Donation to Western Libraries Enables HathiTrust Membership

Thanks to a generous gift from the Hacherl Family, Western Libraries is now a member library of HathiTrust, which means Western Washington University's access to digital content is now expanded. HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative that offers online access to the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries for scholarly, not corporate, interests. 

Most HathiTrust content in the public domain can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection, but with the Western Libraries’ membership in HathiTrust, there are also some additional benefits. WWU students, faculty, and staff now have full viewing and downloading abilities for HathiTrust materials that are in the public domain, in addition to a small number of public domain titles not otherwise accessible to the general public. Access to other materials for which HathiTrust has received permission is now also available. 

There are several ways to search and use the resources in HathiTrust. Full-text content in HathiTrust can be found through Western Libraries OneSearch. You can also search HathiTrust's catalog by Title, Author, and Publication Date, or, you can use keywords to search the full-text of all works in HathiTrust. Metadata are far richer and more consistently applied than in Google Books, an important distinction and consideration for academic researchers. HathiTrust can therefore be used to facilitate textual analyses and other digital humanities projects. 

For more information about Western Libraries membership in HathiTrust, please see Western Libraries HathiTrust guide, or contact Jeff Purdue at purduej@wwu.edu.