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HathiTrust Digital Library : Home

A introduction to using the HathiTrust Digital Library and HathiTrust Research Center for computational analysis and text mining.

What is Hathi Trust?

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions that operates a large-scale digital library. The HathiTrust collection contains over 18 million items digitized at member libraries or through preservation projects such as Google Books and the Internet Archive. UW-Madison Libraries has contributed close to half a million volumes to the HathiTrust Digital Library. 

HathiTrust provides reading access to its materials to the extent allowed by U.S. copyright law. It also provides mediated computational access to their whole corpus for researchers in addition to analysis tools through the HathiTrust Research Center. The University of Wisconsin Madison is a member institution and you can log in using your NetID credentials to explore the collection. 

What is in HathiTrust?

The HathiTrust Digital Library combines collections from over 60 academic and research libraries and includes digitized books, primary sources, magazines, newspapers, sheet music, journals, and government documents. The Library includes featured collections from institutions as well as public collections gathered by individuals. 

  • Subjects: The collection includes all major Library of Congress subjects with the largest collections in Language & Literature, Philosophy, Religion, History, and Social Sciences.
  •  Languages: While English language materials make up the majority of the collection, over 400 other languages are represented, including materials in German, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Afrikaans, extinct languages like Coptic and Akkadian, and constructed languages like Esperanto. 
  • Publication dates: Ranging from early items from the 3rd century to more recent publications. 

Helpful HathiTrust Pages

  • Featured Collections - Access collections curated by HathiTrust staff and member libraries. 
  • HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) - Provides a suite of tools and services that enable large-scale analysis of works in the HathiTrust Digital Library to facilitate non-profit research and educational uses of the collection
  • Embed HathiTrust Books - Instructions on how to embed a HathiTrust title into your website or digital project

Data a & Digital Scholarship Librarian