Research Guides: HathiTrust: General FAQ

About HathiTrust

How do I get more information?
HathiTrust Help Center

How to Search & Access
Is Bowdoin College a member of HathiTrust?
Yes.
What is HathiTrust?
"HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world."

"Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests."
What does "Hathi" mean and how is it pronounced?
"Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal highly regarded for its memory, wisdom, and strength. Trust is a core value of research libraries and one of their greatest assets. In combination, the words convey the key benefits researchers can expect from a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository."

Why is the text view for some books full of misspelled words, gibberish or words in the wrong language?
"The searchable text of HathiTrust volumes is produced through a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR software 'reads' the page images and makes a best guess at identifying the letters and words on a page. This is an automated process, subject to error." More information.
How can I link to a resource in HathiTrust?
See How to make a persistent link in HathiTrust from the University of Missouri.
Did Bowdoin College participate in HathiTrust's Emergency Temporary Access Service due to COVID-19?
No, we did not.

Levels of Access to HathiTrust
	Not logged-in through a member institution	Logged-in through Bowdoin	Accessible Text Request Service participants
Search	Yes, all materials	Yes, all materials	Yes, all materials
View	Public domain materials only	Public domain materials only	Yes, all materials
Download	Public domain materials only; usually only 1 page at a time	Public domain materials only; entire item or 1 page at a time	Yes, all materials
Build collections	No	Yes	Yes
Emergency Temporary Access Service	No	No, Bowdoin was not a participant in this program.	n/a

For more information

How to log in: see the "Getting Started" tab in this guide. (Bowdoin is a HathiTrust member.)
Accessible Text Request Service: see the "Accessible Text Request" tab in this guide.
What materials are in the public domain: see the "Content" tab in this guide.