Hathi Trust Digital Library from Mike Garzio

This post is from Mike Garzio, Social Studies teacher at High School South

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On our recent trip to the New York Public Library, the librarian turned the kids on to this great website www.hathitrust.org/home.

In 2002 google started the Google books project. It was a modest endeavor to digitize all of the world’s knowledge. So they went to 60 of the biggest and best University and Public research libraries in the US, Canada, and Europe and started scanning all of their materials into digital format. Some in the academic community started to wonder what would happen to this resource if Google were to be bought out or go out of business. 

In 2008 HathiTrust was founded to expand on that idea. It is a partnership between 60 different research libraries to easily archive and access this digital content. It includes copyright and public domain materials digitized by Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and the partnerships own efforts. Anything published prior to 1922 is available in full text. Anything still under copyright has been cataloged but not available in full text and can probably be found in circulation somewhere.

In short; almost any book and some journal content published prior to 1922 has been placed in this catalog and is available through an easy to use search function, in full text, for free. The link below is a list of all the HathiTrust partner libraries. It’s an impressive list.

http://www.hathitrust.org/community

-Mike