HathiTrust to the Rescue

Posted on by Claude Potts

hathitrust-books

“Our shelves are closed, but as long as your screens are open,
you’ll have access to most of our resources.”

HathiTrust Digital Library

UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff are able to take advantage of HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service, which provides access to digital versions of millions of the physical volumes held by libraries across the 10-campus University of California system — plus UC’s two expansive off-site library storage facilities. For Berkeley faculty, students, and staff, this opens up a trove of materials,” said Associate University Librarian Salwa Ismail, who worked with HathiTrust to bring the service to fruition for Berkeley. Access the resources by going to the HathiTrust Digital Library. You can view the materials from anywhere with an internet connection — no VPN or special setup is required. This was first announced publicly via the Library’s news story “Need a book from the UC Berkeley Library while we are sheltering in place? Check here first.”  For more information, read HathiTrust’s guide and FAQ.

Five helpful tips:

  1. Make sure you log in as a “partner institution” with your CalNet ID
  2. Before searching the catalog, select “full view only” checkbox at the top to retrieve only those works that are eligible for reading
  3. Click “temporary access” to check out the digitized work for one hour at a time (renewable)
  4. Only one user may check out a book at a time (or one user per each copy of the book we hold)
  5. Use the “return early” button to make it available for another user

 

screenshot HathiTrust search

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.

See also: