HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

History

HathiTrust was founded in October 2008 by the twelve universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the eleven libraries of the University of California. The partnership includes over 60 research libraries across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is based on a shared governance structure. Costs are shared by the participating libraries and library consortia. The repository is administered by the University of Michigan. The executive director of HathiTrust is Mike Furlough. The HathiTrust Shared Print Program is a distributed

collective collection A shared print program is a collective collection, defined by Lorcan Dempsey as an approach to "collective development, management, and disclosure of collections across groups of libraries at different levels", that consists mostly of academic o ...

whose participating libraries have committed to retaining almost 18 million monograph volumes for 25 years, representing three-quarters of HathiTrust digital book holdings. In September 2011, the

Authors Guild The Authors Guild is America's oldest and largest professional organization for writers and provides advocacy on issues of free expression and copyright protection. Since its founding in 1912 as the Authors League of America, it has counted among ...

sued HathiTrust (''

Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust ''Authors Guild v. HathiTrust'', 755 F.3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014), is a United States copyright decision finding search and accessibility uses of digitized books to be fair use. The Authors Guild, other author organizations, and individual authors clai ...

''), alleging massive copyright violation. A federal court ruled against the Authors Guild in October 2012, finding that HathiTrust's use of books scanned by Google was fair use under US law. The court's opinion relied on the

transformativeness In United States copyright law, transformative use or transformation is a type of fair use that builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original, and thus does not infringe its holder's copyright. Tr ...

doctrine of federal copyright law, holding that the Trust had transformed the copyrighted works without infringing on the copyright holders' rights. That decision was largely affirmed by the Second Circuit on June 10, 2014, which found that providing search and

accessibility Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" (i. ...

for the visually impaired were grounds to consider the service transformative and fair use, and remanded to the lower court to reconsider whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue regarding HathiTrust's library preservation copies. In October 2015, HathiTrust comprised over 13.7 million volumes, including 5.3 million in the public domain in the United States. HathiTrust provides a number of discovery and access services, notably, full-text search across the entire repository. In 2016 over 6.17 million users located in the United States and in 236 other nations used Hathitrust in 10.92 million sessions. As of 2021, the copyright policy states that "many works in our collection are protected by copyright law, so we cannot ordinarily publicly display large portions of those protected works unless we have permission from the copyright holder", and thus "if we cannot determine the copyright or permission status of a work, we restrict access to that work until we can establish its status. Because of differences in international copyright laws, access is also restricted for users outside the United States to works published outside the United States after and including 1896."

PageTurner

PageTurner is the web application on the HathiTrust website for viewing publications. From PageTurner readers can navigate through a publication, download a

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

version of it, and view pages in different ways, such as one page at a time, scrolling, flipping, or thumbnail views.

Emergency Temporary Access Service

The Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) is a service provided by HathiTrust that makes it possible in certain special situations, such as closure of a library for a public health emergency, for users of HathiTrust member libraries to obtain lawful access to copyright digital materials in place of the corresponding physical books held by the same library through the controlled digital lending model.

Etymology

''Hathi'', pronounced "hah-tee", is the Hindi word for " elephant", an animal famed for its long-term memory.

References

External links