New Access to Over 17 Million Digital Items Through HathiTrust

Posted on: January 26, 2021

HathiTrust website

The JMU community now has access to the HathiTrust Digital Library with over 17 million digitized books, journals, and other publications.

What is HathiTrust?

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative that shares and preserves millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. It provides reading access as allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and more.

JMU Libraries recently joined this international community of research libraries to further support education and research at JMU, the scholarly needs of the broader public, and the long-term availability of the cultural record. In the event of disrupted access to our facilities, as happened early in the pandemic, HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service will also allow us to make nearly 40% of our print collection available to you for digital check-out!

How to use HathiTrust

Visit HathiTrust website​ and click the “LOG IN” button. Select or enter James Madison University and log in with your JMU credentials. All JMU students, faculty, and staff may log in.

Once logged in, you may:

  • read or download complete books and other works that are in the public domain or made available through open access
  • search the full text of single or multiple books or other works
  • perform digital humanities activities, including complex analyses and data mining research, with HathiTrust Research Center services

Items in HathiTrust that are in the public domain (i.e. not subject to copyright) can be found in Library Search, our JMU Libraries catalog.

Learn more about using the HathiTrust Digital Library in this five-minute video.

Accessible text available

JMU community members who are blind or qualify for print disability services through JMU’s Office of Disability Services may obtain an accessible copy of any book in the HathiTrust collection. Learn more on HathiTrust’s accessibility page.

Another step toward open access at JMU Libraries

This recent addition is part of our ongoing work to promote open access and sustainability in our collections and in the world of scholarly publishing. If you have questions about HathiTrust or any other aspect of our collections, please contact your liaison librarian.

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