Over the summer library bits, bots, and elves have been hard at work batch loading hundreds of thousands of HathiTrust records for the digitized versions of public domain items into OskiCat. As you search for books and other library materials, you’ll undoubtedly begin to encounter these new records for materials published prior to 1923. Here is just a sampling of the kinds of digitized texts in the HathiTrust Digital Library and that are now discoverable through OskiCat:
When the project is complete, there will be over one million new records in OskiCat. You can limit a search to these by combining “hathitrust” with some other keyword(s), such as hathitrust roma or hathitrust “victor hugo”, etc.
Public domain means that the items are not protected by copyright. U.S. government documents and works published before 1923 are examples of items in the public domain. All users can view the full-text of these books online. UC Berkeley faculty, staff, and students can download the whole book (PDF) by logging in with your CalNet ID.
This service is possible because the University of California libraries are partners in HathiTrust (pronounced “hah-tee”), a national project to create a shared archive of books scanned into electronic format.
This is a remixed and updated version of a library blog post from June 18, 2012.