About HathiTrust

Wondering whether Middlebury could join HathiTrust as a member institution? A few things to know:

1. HathiTrust is primarily a preservation initiative that provides online access to books an institution owns if that institution’s physical copy becomes no longer usable. Membership does not provide access to titles we do not already own.
2. The benefits are more limited than they appear:
   • We gain access to electronic versions of books only if we own them and only if the physical copy is no longer usable. An exception does exist for individual users with accessibility needs; these cases must be individually documented with HathiTrust. Titles we do not own we would not gain access to, unless they’re public-domain titles…to which we already have access.
   • If we own one copy of a work that’s no longer usable, we would gain electronic access for one user at a time, just the same as if we still had a print copy available.
   • Public-domain works (out of copyright: generally before 1925, government publications, or works created under open-access licensing) are freely available to nonmembers already.
   • While public-domain works are available in full text, nonmembers can download PDFs only one page at a time. Users affiliated with member institutions can  download whole works at once. This is the main thing that would change if Middlebury were to join HathiTrust.
3. The cost is significant. It’s based on the size of our print collection and the proportion of HathiTrust books that match what we own. We can obtain a firm quote only by uploading our entire catalog to HathiTrust in a very specific format, which is an undertaking requiring a lot of staff time.

We’re willing to do the work required in order to obtain a quote; we just want to make sure everyone interested truly understands what HathiTrust membership does and doesn’t provide.

More questions? See http://www.hathitrust.org, and especially http://www.hathitrust.org/access_use.