HathiTrust Digital Library

What does Hathi mean?

Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, known for its long memory, strength, and wisdom.  Trust is an essential value of research libraries and one of their greatest assets. The terms together convey the benefits researchers can expect from a collaborative digital repository focused on preserving and sustaining our common scholarly inheritance.

Mission

The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.

History

HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections, though it has quickly expanded to include a large and growing partnership community.

Hathi is an extremely large and growing digital repository. 

• As of 2023, it contains over 18 million volumes
• About 38% of the collection, over 6,000,000 volumes, is in the public domain (Full View items)
• The primary contributors of new HathiTrust content are large academic libraries, as well as institutions such as the Library of Congress and New York Public Library
• Includes all major Library of Congress subjects with the largest collections in Language & Literature, Philosophy, Religion, History, and Social Sciences. 
• English language titles make up 51% of the collection followed by German, French, Spanish, and Russian. The 400+ other languages include Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Afrikaans, as well as materials from extinct languages like Coptic and Akkadian and constructed languages like Esperanto.