[HN Gopher] HathiTrust Digital Library
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HathiTrust Digital Library
Author : djoldman
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-07-15 14:32 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hathitrust.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hathitrust.org)
| pyuser583 wrote:
| This is an excellent resource! It should be more popular!
| JdeBP wrote:
| It is. It's used on a fairly regular basis nowadays in
| Wikipedia, for example. A decade ago one would have seen just
| the Internet Archive or the dreaded Google Books hyperlinks.
| dilawar wrote:
| Haathi means elephant in Hindi. I first thought it is to be an
| Indian site but it is based in the US.
|
| Curious about the connection.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| There's an English saying, "an elephant never forgets." I'm
| guessing its about that.
| shervinafshar wrote:
| Tangential:
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Memory_Systems
|
| - https://i.imgur.com/vNQURE3.jpeg
| JdeBP wrote:
| You can still find the original answer, from 2008, at
| https://old.www.hathitrust.org/help_general.html .
| apaprocki wrote:
| I would use this site all the time for genealogy purposes. It's
| hard to unravel how the datasets are shared, because many things
| here are from Google's scanning, but IMO there are lots of things
| that do not appear anywhere else.
| robin_reala wrote:
| We use Hathi a lot at Standard Ebooks as a source of scans to
| proof productions against. Archive.org has a somewhat better
| interface, but Hathi has a wider selection.
| cxr wrote:
| Try John Mark Ockerbloom's Online Books Page:
|
| <https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>
|
| For the books that have been manually curated, multiple
| collections are indexed, including HathiTrust and the Internet
| Archive. Search will also fall back to showing hits from the
| "extended shelves" if a title is not in the catalog.
| shervinafshar wrote:
| Thanks for your volunteer work for Standard Ebooks!
| leetrout wrote:
| My family is from Eastern KY and I had access to the HTDL and
| NYPL through my stint working for a public university a few years
| ago. It's fascinating what you can find in there! When I had
| looked a couple years ago it seemed like there wasn't as much
| publicly available as what I am seeing now.
| philipkglass wrote:
| HathiTrust is much better than Google Books about allowing access
| to works that are no longer under copyright in the United States.
| Under US law, everything published 1929 and before is currently
| in the public domain. But there are a lot of special cases where
| 20th century works published after 1929 are also in the public
| domain:
|
| https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
|
| Google Books appears to follow the blanket 1929 rule, or did the
| last time I looked. HathiTrust has cleared the copyright status
| for many additional works following the more complex rules, e.g.
|
| "Drawing Birds" by Joy Postle, 1953:
|
| https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433115876140&se...
|
| Unfortunately, the Google-originated scans that HathiTrust has
| come with special restrictions. Google itself required that only
| people associated with the academic libraries could download
| whole books as a unit, even for works that are in the public
| domain:
|
| https://hathitrust.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal...
|
| Fortunately, members of the public _can_ download individual page
| scans without any special affiliation. People have naturally
| written tools to automate this process so that full books can be
| reassembled and then uploaded to the Internet Archive or other
| book sites.
|
| Google Books has a much faster and sometimes better search
| interface, so a common flow I use is to search Google Books for
| terms and then go to HathiTrust to read inside books that Google
| Books surfaced but won't show.
|
| EDIT: corrected 1926 to 1929 per cxr's comment below.
| billbrown wrote:
| This is very helpful context. I have disparaged HathiTrust in
| my mind for several of these public domain problems and it
| makes sense that it's actually a Google Books problem.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| As a nuclear power historian, this resource is unbelievably
| valuable. I've been using it for years and it constantly delivers
| the goods. It contains incredible multitudes.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| Somewhat tangential, but HathiTrust was born from what I would
| consider the "golden age" of technical work coming out of
| libraries (2002-2010). One of the unintended consequences of the
| dotcom crash was that compensation falling meant that there were
| a lot of talented software people working on what interested them
| rather than what simply paid the most (since the gap was much
| smaller).
|
| As a result research libraries were well staffed with _very_
| technical people all genuinely interested in making software that
| made the world a better place. MIT 's DSpace, LibraryThing, Open
| ILSs like Evergreen/Koha, and a huge range of quirky/innovative
| smaller projects that no longer exist all came out of this
| period.
|
| It ended around 2010 since the GFC fallout started to hit library
| budgets while tech suddenly started getting really hot. Even if
| you loved libraries, most library devs where facing pay cuts to
| stay in libraries versus massive raises and other quality of life
| improvements for going into tech. Plus startups and tech
| companies in general at the time felt more inspired.
| geephroh wrote:
| And now that government funding sources like IMLS, CLIR, NEH,
| NARA and LoC have been nuked and/or crippled, things are
| unlikely to get better any time soon, especially for
| collaborative research projects that have no immediate
| commercial benefit.
| TZubiri wrote:
| One day I needed some legal info, I call the library of congress,
| they send me a link to hathitrust with a hearing from 1980. Sent
| to my email, boom I take that link add it to wikipedia.
|
| All free (tax dollars ok) and swift, felt surreal.
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