Hathi Trust



HathiTrust is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via the Google Books project and Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

HathiTrust was founded in October 2008 by the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California. The partnership includes over 60 research libraries across the United States and Europe, and is based on a shared governance structure. Costs are shared by the participating libraries and library consortia. The repository is administered by Indiana University and the University of Michigan. The Executive Director of HathiTrust is John Price Wilkin, who has led large-scale digitization initiatives at the University of Michigan since the mid-1990s.

As of January 2012, HathiTrust comprises over 10 million volumes, over 2.7 million of which are public domain (at least in the US). HathiTrust provides a number of discovery and access services, notably, full-text search across the entire repository.

In September 2011, the Authors Guild sued HathiTrust (Authors Guild v. HathiTrust), alleging massive copyright violation. A federal court ruled against the Authors Guild in October 2012, finding that HathiTrust's use of books scanned by Google was fair use under US law.

Hathi, pronounced "hah-tee", is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal famed for its long-term memory.