OSU Library Joins HathiTrust

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Oklahoma State University 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.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than 80 partners. The partners have contributed nearly 11 million volumes digitized from their library collections. More than 3.4 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available online.

According to Sheila Johnson, Dean of OSU Libraries, there are many benefits to OSU’s faculty, students and on-campus visitors.

“The HathiTrust collections add a breadth of materials with outstanding searchiblity of the full-text,” Johnson said. “The collection is continuously growing because new members like OSU are always adding new materials. It’s a wonderful example of collaboration among academic libraries.”

HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds. It provides the expert curation and consistent access associated with research libraries. Second, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections as both a service for partners and a public good. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching to public domain volumes, and searching of copyright volumes. Specialized features are also available which facilitate access by people with disabilities and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into “collections” that can be searched and browsed.

HathiTrust is funded by the partner libraries and governed by members of the libraries through its Board of Governors. More information on HathiTrust is available at www.hathitrust.org.