HathiTrust

HathiTrust is a collaborative digital library collection begun in 2008 by a partnership of large research libraries in the United States. It was originally conceived as a collaboration of the 13 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia to establish a repository for those universities to archive and share their digitized collections. At present there are over 66 partnership institutions in the HathiTrust with a digital collection of over 10 million volumes. The main goals of this “not for profit” but for the “common good” digital repository is to enable for current access as well as for future preservation a large volume of literature and documented heritage to support the activities of study and scholarly research. In addition it works to deliver to the end user the additional benefits resulting from digitization such as ability for reading digitized print by optical character recognition (OCR). Although at present the partnership community mainly represents U.S. research libraries, it promises a great future in sharing as common good for scholarship and research by institutions worldwide with an even richer research library at Web scale.