Published: Sept. 26, 2018

Hathi Trust logoThe University of Colorado Boulder Libraries have become the newest member of HathiTrust, a global partnership of major research institutions and libraries working towards its mission to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. Today, ten years after its founding, HathiTrust holds the largest set of digitized books managed by the academic, research, and library community, which offers an unprecedented opportunity to steward the cultural record through increasingly interdependent work that develops capacity and sparks innovation.

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

Over the last ten years, members have contributed more than 16 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through a number of means including Google and Internet Archive digitization and in-house initiatives. More than 6 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available online.

To login to HathiTrust as a CU Boulder member:

  1. Go to the https://www.hathitrust.org/.
  2. Click on the yellow “LOG IN” button.
  3. Select University of Colorado Boulder from the drop-down menu and click “CONTINUE.”
  4. Enter your IdentiKey and password and click on “Log In.”

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 members and the 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 copyrighted works. 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.

“In the past I served as a co-founder of the HathiTrust Research Center, which provides advanced textual data mining services to HathiTrust member affiliated researchers,” says Dean of the CU Boulder Libraries, Robert H. McDonald. “This service has recently expanded to include all 16+ million volumes within the collection, which will best support the researchers at the University of Colorado as they look to utilize the HathiTrust corpus in the creation of new knowledge. This type of analysis of the collection is sometimes termed distant reading and enables researchers to analyze content using scientific means such as hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, and quantitative analysis, the very skills which are supported by the Libraries’ Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship.”

“HathiTrust is pleased to welcome the University of Colorado Boulder as a new member. We’re glad to have the opportunity to support their university community with access to our extensive collections and computational research tools. We also look forward to working with the university and Dean of Libraries, Robert H. McDonald, on addressing the large scale challenges libraries collectively face,” says Mike Furlough, Executive Director of HathiTrust.

Hathi Trust 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 member libraries and governed by members of the libraries through its Board of Governors. More information on HathiTrust is available at: https://www.hathitrust.org/.

As the flagship university of a multi-campus system in the state of Colorado, CU Boulder is a dynamic community of scholars and learners situated on one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country.  As one of 34 U.S. public institutions belonging to the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU)—and the only member in the Rocky Mountain region—we have a proud tradition of academic excellence, with five Nobel laureates and more than 50 members of prestigious academic academies.

The University Libraries faculty and staff share the CU Boulder mission to serve the people of Colorado and engage the world through excellence in teaching, research, creative work and service. The Libraries, a member of the Association of Research Libraries, hold the largest collection in the Rocky Mountain region with over 12 million books, periodicals, government publications, audiovisual materials, microforms, maps, manuscripts, papers and computer-based resources. The Libraries faculty and staff collaborate internally, with colleagues beyond the campus, and with our clients to advance information literacy, intellectual freedom, lifelong learning, the disciplinary growth of information, and the amplification of knowledge. You can learn more about our resources and services at http://www.colorado.edu/libraries.