HathiTrust Digital Library

With the HathiTrust Digital Library, you have access to a collection of millions of books and journals digitized from libraries around the world. Materials are dated from 1500 to the present, and cover subjects typical of any large North American research library.

Items in the public domain — more than a third of the collection — are fully available for everyone, and items held in copyright are full-text searchable.

Patrons who have print disabilities can obtain downloaded copies of anything in the HathiTrust collection by using HathiTrust’s Accessible Text Request Service.

Content includes materials from the Google Books Project, the Internet Archive, and digitized collections from member libraries. 

Find tips for searching, viewing, downloading and more in our HathiTrust guide.

History of the collection

HathiTrust is a nonprofit collaborative of academic and research libraries. It has preserved more than 17 million digitized items thus far, securing them for easy access and preserving them for future use.

The project began in 2008 with infrastructure put in place at the University of Michigan. U-M has been a significant contributor, with more than 4.8 million items scanned and deposited.