WVU Libraries

West Virginia University students, faculty and staff will now have access to an array of unique resources from more than 110 academic institutions from around the globe through an agreement between WVU Libraries and HathiTrust.

“We are thrilled to be part of HathiTrust and bring its rich benefits to our University community,” Dean of Libraries Jon Cawthorne said. “We will have digital access to a collection of amazing digital titles from leading universities across the nation and beyond.”

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research libraries collaborating to preserve and provide digital access their institutions special collections. The group draws its name from the Hindi word for elephant, hathi, symbolic of the memory, wisdom and strength evoked by the animal, as well as the huge undertaking of gathering prized resources from research libraries around the world.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership with more than 110 partners. During the last eight years, the partners have contributed more than 14.7 million volumes to the digital library from a number of sources, including the Google Book Project, Internet Archive and partner library contributions.

Holdings cover all disciplines. For example, a few of the items recently highlighted include:

• more than 1,000 manuscripts from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection at the University of Michigan;

• 143 15th-century books from the Complutense University of Madrid;

• 863 documents (legislation, court proceedings, records, correspondence, etc.) from the 13 original colonies, at the University of Pennsylvania;

• more than 3,000 musical scores by female composers from the 19th- and early 20th-centuries from the University of Michigan Music Library;

• and a collection of books on Oceanography and the history of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from the University of California, San Diego.

HathiTrust membership comes with several benefits. While anyone can view more than 5.7 million of the site’s public domain volumes, only HathiTrust partner institutions can perform advanced searches, download and print materials, and create accounts to store selected documents and collections.

“We are delighted to have West Virginia University Libraries join HathiTrust,” said Mike Furlough, executive director of HathiTrust. “Our partnership is only as strong as our members. We look forward to working with WVULibraries as we continue to develop these programs and services available to our institutions’ students and faculty.”

For more information about using HathiTrust resources, read the research guide.