FAQ

Any research library with digital content or an interest in curation of digital content can become a partner. International partners are welcome. HathiTrust provides a platform for library directors looking for a straightforward solution to archiving their digital content. It also provides a solution to library directors who believe libraries have a responsibility to ensure their collections are broadly available and preserved.

One of the great benefits to partners of joining HathiTrust is a no-worry, pain-free solution to archiving vast amounts of digital content. Your institution can rely on the expertise of other librarians and information technologists who understand your needs and who will address the issues of servers, storage, migration, long-term preservation. Furthermore, you won’t have to invest in the hardware, management, maintenance or updates to the repository, or create your own service software (such as the page-turner). If you represent a library whose content is being scanned by Google, HathiTrust provides the infrastructure to get your own files online. HathiTrust partners also have the ability to participate in the governance of HathiTrust, influencing policies and future directions. Institutions that have become partners by September 2010 and contributed content by March 2011 will participate in a Constitutional Convention that will reconfigure the governance, cost, and partnership models for HathiTrust.

HathiTrust complements Google’s massive undertaking to digitize the world’s library collections. While both systems offer digitized books via the Internet, it is likely that HathiTrust will provide some content Google will not, such as digital collections unique to each institution, works from institutional repositories, and native born-digital materials.HathiTrust also provides a new platform for the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. The trust and reliance developed over decades in providing essential print collections will extend to HathiTrust as a valued source for scholarly materials.

HathiTrust is concerned with curating the collections of research libraries, regardless of who digitizes the content. HathiTrust already contains materials digitized by some of the partners, and some of the HathiTrust partners are also Internet Archive partners. In time, we hope that HathiTrust will bring together content from a wide range of digitization efforts, including the Internet Archive.

Absolutely. Creating a digital research library for the research community is the responsibility of research libraries. Its development will build on the established leadership of research libraries in information management, advance their shared missions of serving the intellectual needs of their communities, and help them direct the future growth of the digital landscape.The activities of research libraries in the next five to 10 years will define the role of libraries in the digital age. The library community must now ensure that these collections not only retain their research value in a digital platform, but also realize their potential as users adjust their information needs and expectations.

Research libraries with digital content can archive and store their own content. HathiTrust, however, offers the expertise and infrastructure required to archive and preserve vast amounts of digitized materials, and in so doing, leverage the combined resources of a community with shared goals.

Partners will be charged a one-time start-up fee based on the number of volumes added to the repository, in addition to an annual fee for the curation of those volumes. HathiTrust is a non-profit extension of the research libraries that founded it, and as such does not seek to profit from this work. We hope that by sharing infrastructure and strategies, even highly secure and expert curation can be a cost-effective option for participants.

Some institutions, attracted foremost to the archiving benefits of HathiTrust, may restrict access to materials they do not want made available via the Internet. In this case, HathiTrust can also function as a "dark archive” while ensuring long-term preservation. Nevertheless, we hope to provide access to as much content as possible.

HathiTrust is administered by an Executive Committee that meets monthly and is guided by a Strategic Advisory Board that meets quarterly and works on a variety of issues ranging from finances to development priorities. Please see HathiTrust Governance for more information.

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. Where we have the right to show page images of works, we will make every effort to do so. We are currently displaying works that are in the public domain (such as US works published before 1923), uncopyrightable works (such as works of the US government), or works where we have permission from the copyright holder. 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 between 1868 and 1909. See "What are the different Copyright statuses of items in HathiTrust, and what do they mean?" below for more information about this restriction. Please use the feedback form at the top of each page to let us know if our records are incorrectly restricting access to an item. For more information, see the page on HathiTrust Rights Management and the Access and Use Policy.

Some works that are currently restricted may in fact be in the public domain. We have begun the (huge) task of investigating works published between 1923 and 1963 that were determined by initial automated methods to be in copyright. Whenever we can determine a particular work is in the public domain we will provide full access to it. In addition, if we receive permission from rights-holders to display the full-text, we will provide full access to those works. If you have information about the rights status of any of our restricted texts, please contact us using the feedback form at the top of each page.

If you are a student at the University of Michigan with a disability that does not allow you to use printed books, special text versions of HathiTrust materials can be made available to you. Please see the Services for Students with Disabilities website for more information. HathiTrust is currently working on expanding these services to students at other institutions. We cannot otherwise make exceptions for viewing online copyrighted material. Physical copies can be viewed at the library that holds the original. Physical copies may also be borrowed through interlibrary loan arrangements with your local library.

Even for works that are fully protected by copyright, you can search within the text of the item to find out how many times a particular word or phrase appears. Doing so may help you decide whether you want to seek out a physical copy, or find a specific section or phrase if the physical copy is in-hand.

HathiTrust maintains a database of every item in the Library and a corresponding rights status. Brief descriptions of the most common statuses are given below. Detailed descriptions of all statuses, with information about how they are determined and stored, are available on the HathiTrust Rights Database page.

• Public Domain - In general, these are texts that are 1) US federal government documents 2) published in the US prior to 1923 or 3) published outside of the US before 1869. Volumes may be determined to be in the public domain for other reasons, however. See the link to the HathiTrust Rights Database page above for more information.
• Public Domain only when viewed in the United States - Works published outside the US prior to 1909 are in the public domain; however, due to the variations in copyright law in countries outside the US, it is estimated that 1869 is the earliest date foreign works may still be under copyright. Therefore, users accessing the volume from US IP addresses will have access to the works published outside the US between 1869 and 1909; however, users with non-US IP addresses will not.
• In-copyright - Texts that do not meet the criteria for Public Domain (e.g,. US post-1923 and not a government document) are treated as in-copyright.
• Available to nobody; blocked for all users - Works that have restricted viewing access due to the presence of personal private information or a request to be taken down. This is typically a temporary status while an issue is resolved.
• Available to everyone in the world - In-copyright Works that the University of Michigan has been given permission by the copyright holder to display on a broad basis. The scope of permission granted may restrict some use, such as not allowing the sale of reprints. Please send inquiries about individual volumes to mdp-help@umich.edu.
• Undertermined copyright status - Instances where copyright status could not be determined by automatic processes from bibliographic data, copyright research is only partially complete, or an ambiguous, unclear, or otherwise time-consuming situation was encountered. Items with this status are treated as though they are in copyright.

Please use the feedback link at the top of each page, and we will address your questions. Any issues concerning copyright permissions for items will be addressed within a business day of notification. For more information, see the HathiTrust Take-Down Policy.

There are 4 ways to search items in HathiTrust, which are all accessible from http://catalog.hathitrust.org:

1. Catalog Search: Search bibliographic fields such as Title, Author, Publication Date.
2. Full-text Search: Use keywords to search the full-text of all items in HathiTrust.
3. Collection Builder: Search inside a collection of materials that you or others have created
4. Single-volume Search: When viewing an item in PageTurner (see example), use keywords to search inside that volume alone.

Yes. In Collection Builder, you can search all the books in a private or public collection. See What can I do with my collection for more information on Collection Builder searching.

The addition of advanced search is currently being explored but it is not yet available.

Non-linguistic content is not searchable at the present time.

Yes. A "wildcard" search is formed by appending the asterisk character (*) to the end of the term. For example, "fond*" would find "fond," "fondest," "fondly," etc.

If the work is in a Latin alphabet with diacritical marks, it is not necessary to enter the character with diacritical marks. For example, you may enter "Émile," "émile," "Emile," or "emile" and a page containing any of these forms will be found.

Yes. We are receiving text in some non-Western languages including as Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Other non-Latin languages will be supported in the coming years. Our goal is full international coverage.

This message is displayed in 3 cases:

1. Pages were missing from the library's print copy of the book. If a book does have a missing page, this generally means that two pages are missing, since publishers generally print on both sides of the page. So, if pages 81-82 of a book are missing, there should be two pages with the message "Page not available" between pages 80 and 83.
2. One or more pages were not scanned.
3. In some cases, Google will misidentify a page, leading them to believe that a page is missing when it is not. For example, if they misidentify p. 206 as "205" they will think p. 206 is missing. They will insert a page to display "Page not available," although there is no missing page. Please notify us using the feedback form if you believe that a page has been misidentified in this way.

Sequence numbers indicate the order of the physical pages of the book, and they rarely match up with pagination, which is inserted by printers. The sequence numbers start with the very first image in the book, which is usually the front cover. Thus, the sequence number and the page number will rarely be the same. We have sequence numbers for all items, but some items may not have page numbers (items digitized early in Google's process, in particular, are lacking page number tagging).

Search terms are not highlighted on the page images, but for works we can show you, they are highlighted in the text view. Do your search in the box in the upper right-hand corner of the page display. You'll see your search terms highlighted on the search results page. Follow the link to a page or sequence number, change the format to text, and you will see the search term highlighted on the text view in the page display.

These are not features that we have available now, but we will be collecting requests as part of our development process. Please submit suggestions via our feedback form.

Our system conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, priority 1 <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/>. The system can display each page either as an image or as text (although due to the limitations of Optical Character Recognition software the text may contain errors). Text is available one page at a time and is readable by screen readers. If you are aware of ways in which we can improve accessibility, please tell us how we can make it better. This page contains more information on the Hathi Trust Digital Library and accessibility: <http://babel.hathitrust.org/m/mdp/accessibility.html>.

Currently, the process is to add individual items to a collection from the HathiTrust Pageturner. You will see a box in the upper left corner of the Pageturner that prompts you to add the item you're viewing to a collection. You can add it to either an existing collection or you can create a new collection. Librarians and others wishing to create large collections should send an inquiry via the feedback button at the top of each page.

Yes. It is necessary to login to create a permanent collection, so if you do not have a University of Michigan uniqname, you will need to create a "friend" account. More information on Friend accounts can be found here: http://www.itd.umich.edu/itcsdocs/s4316/. Once your Friend account is set up, you will be able to log in and save your collection.

The main functionality available in a collection is the ability to search within it. You can search the full text of all books items saved in one of your collections. In addition, you can share your collections with others by making them public.

Yes. Searching and faceted browsing of all items is available through the temporary beta Catalog. Full text searching of the entire library is available at this location as well.

Not yet. Currently you can only add items to a collection from the HathiTrust Pageturner.

When you select PDF under "view page as", you will receive a single-page PDF of the page currently displayed. There is significant overlap of volumes in HathiTrust and Google Book Search and if a book is "full view" in HathiTrust, it is possible that a PDF of the entire book can be downloaded from Google Book Search.

We cannot provide digital copies of these volumes.

Not currently. Aggregate statistics on HathiTrust usage are available at http://stats.umdl.umich.edu under HathiTrust. As with all of the statistics that the library collects, we do not collect personal information.

The persistent URL for each volume is displayed in the left sidebar when viewing an item. We use the "handle" form of persistent URLs.

The searchable text of these volumes is produced through a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR software "reads" the page images and makes a best guess at identifying the letters and words on a page. This is an automated process, subject to error, particularly if the original printing or the scan is of poor quality, if the printed fonts are difficult to read, or if the text is lightly printed. Even the best quality OCR usually contains an error or two per page. While this does not usually cause significant problems with searching, it does mean that the OCR text is not a faithful reproduction of the printed (or scanned) original.

Even poorer quality texts will be searchable but they are more prone to OCR errors and thus the ability to retrieve every occurrence of a term will be diminished. Text quality can be improved by improvements in OCR software and by human correction. We will incorporate better text whenever possible.

We do not yet have a system in place to accept corrected text. We hope to have one in place in the future since feedback and assistance from the user community will help us to improve quality.

HathiTrust is very interested in user feedback and in collecting suggestions for improving the repository. Please submit your comments through the feedback form at the top of every page. If you have questions about copyright, partnership, or general questions about HathiTrust, you have may also contact us at hathitrust-info@umich.edu.

We will be working on the functionality of the repository in the coming years. Our goals include better navigation of the books, supporting scholarly citation, and the ability to support computational research.

You can click on the Help link in the navigation bar when you are viewing an item, or submit a question through the feedback form at the top of every page.

Remixed versions of Silk Icons created by Mark James used courtesy Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License.  
Remixed versions of Fugue Icons created by Yusuke Kamiyamane used courtesy Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.