The Georgia Tech Library is the newest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

Through HathiTrust, the Georgia Tech campus community can now freely access more than 4.5 million digital books and journals in the public domain from a desktop or mobile device. Users can search HathiTrust’s catalog, curate their own private libraries, and download digital material at no cost.

“As a partner, we have access to full-text searching of materials in all of the HathiTrust collection,” said Fred Rascoe, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the Georgia Tech Library. “In addition, Georgia Tech students, faculty, and researchers can download the full-text of any public domain document."

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than one hundred partners.

“Membership in HathiTrust is a means to assure preservation of Georgia Tech’s digital copies and contribute or sustain those volumes to an increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by academic institutions,” said Rascoe.

Over the last six years, partners contributed more than 12 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through a number of means including Google, Internet Archive digitization, and in-house initiatives.

HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository, it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries.

Second, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections.

This includes viewing, downloading, and searching access to public domain volumes, and searching access to copyright volumes. Specialized features are also available which facilitate access by persons with print disabilities, and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into “collections” that can be searched and browsed.

“Membership will allow us to have a place to preserve items from future digitization projects, for instance if we scanned government documents from our collection,” Rascoe said. “The advantage of being a HathiTrust member is the ability to make any digitization work of benefit to the whole user community.”

HathiTrust was named for the Hindi word for elephant, hathi, symbolic of the qualities of memory, wisdom, and strength evoked by elephants, as well as the huge undertaking of congregating the digital collections of libraries in the United States and beyond. HathiTrust is funded by the partner libraries and governed by members of the libraries through its Board of Governors.

Visit HathiTrust's website for more information.