A few months ago, I was falling down a fairly standard research rabbit hole: I came across an obscure scientist from the early 1900s who happened to be a woman and who happened to have written a great deal about prairie conservation long before it was fashionable. I didn’t know if or how I would incorporate her into my writing but I knew I had to learn more. I had the research itch.
Fortunately, the university where she worked had an archive of her papers. So I emailed the special collections staff to request a few of the most enticing items, along with one that wasn’t listed in the finding guide but that I really REALLY wanted—in hopes that they might know where to find it.
Less than three hours later, a librarian wrote back and politely explained that two of the documents I requested—including the one that wasn’t in their archive—were available on HathiTrust.
With those out of the way and another document available elsewhere on the internet, my three remaining requests totaled less than 20 pages—the threshold at which the library charges researchers for digitizing documents. She had already scanned them (for free) and sent along the link. I momentarily melted into a puddle of gratitude then eagerly got to reading, like a kid unwrapping a birthday present.
What’s the moral of this story? One is that librarians are brilliant, helpful, and unfailingly kind. Another is that you should always check HathiTrust when you’re looking for something. It contains literal millions of publicly available books, reports, and other documents. AND it’s full-text searchable. Swoon.
Read on for a quick overview…
What is HathiTrust?
HathiTrust is a digital library that was founded in 2008 and includes material from 60-odd academic libraries. It contains 17 million digitized, searchable documents in more than 460 languages, including 8.5 million books and 1.4 million documents from the U.S. federal government. It is managed by the University of Michigan.
How do I access material?
Anyone can go to the website and search the library. If you tick the “full-text” option under the search bar, it will only return results that are publicly available. If you search “catalog view,” you will see everything but may not have access without membership to a partner institution.
You can narrow the search results using a number of filters, including author and date of publication.
Do I need to be a member?
You do not need to be affiliated with a member institution to read and search documents online. If you want to save documents to a collection for future reference, you can create a guest account.
Can I download pdfs of the material?
Public users can download one page at a time, which is helpful if you only need a short passage. If you have access to a university library, you can usually download the whole book.
Is it legal?
Yes, but it has faced challenges.
Basically, while digitizing books and making them available to the public is great for researchers, it isn’t so great for authors, who have argued that HathiTrust infringes their copyrights. So far, however, courts have found that HathiTrust is protected under fair use.
This looks like a fascinating resource. I'm going to go digging there when I get a bit of time.