HathiTrust began in 2008 as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized collections. HathiTrust has quickly expanded to include additional partners and to provide those partners with an easy means to archive their digital content.  

Emory joined the consortium in 2011.

The initial focus of the partnership has been on preserving and providing access to digitized book and journal content from the partner library collections, including materials digitized by Google, Internet Archive, and Microsoft, as well as through in-house initiatives. To date the partnership has digitized approximately 10 million books. The consortium is planning on expanding the corpus to nearly 15M in the next five years.

What can I access in the repository?  

• the full content of approximately 2.7 million books that are in the public domain
• the ability to search the remaining 8 million books for a search phrase