HathiTrust Digital Library: Toronto Metropolitan University

HathiTrust is a growing, global partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. There are more than 140 members in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide.

How to access the HathiTrust Collection.

1. Go to the HathiTrust Collection.

2. You will be prompted to login using your my.torontomu credentials. If you are already signed in, authentication will happen automatically.

3. You can then search the HathiTrust collection.  

Users can:

• Search across the entire collection
• Read and view works that are "full-view"
• Search within works that are "limited (search-only)"
• Download a single page at a time from works that have download restrictions
• Download an entire work that doesn't have download restrictions

HathiTrust is not strictly a platform to provide access to public domain materials. It also serves an important role in archiving materials "in support of the record of human knowledge." Whereas TMU Library has a full membership to HathiTrust there are resources that are "Limited (search-only)" due to active copyright restrictions (as per U.S. copyright law). One restriction, for example, is the geographic location of the user. For additional information on HathiTrust's copyright and access, visit their Copyright information page.

If you are interested in viewing materials restricted to "search only," please submit a request using the TMU Library Interlibrary Loan service.

Primary Catalog Search:

• Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction"
• Wildcards: Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to stand for several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum; wom?n will find woman and women. If you would simply like to browse without entering a search term you can enter * by itself.
• Boolean Searching: Use AND and OR (capitalized) between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., (heart OR cardiac) AND surgery will find works about heart surgery or cardiac surgery

Full-text Search:

• Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction"
• Multiple Term Searching: When your search terms are not quoted phrases, avoid common words (such as: 'a', 'and', 'of', 'the', etc.) to speed up your search.
• Boolean Searching: Use AND and OR (capitalized) between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., heart OR cardiac will find works containing the word heart or the word cardiac; heart AND cardiac will find works containing both words. Use a minus (-) to remove words from the result e.g., heart  -cardiac will find works containing the word heart that do not include the word cardiac.
• As in the catalog, if you would like to browse without entering a search term you can enter * by itself.

Full-text Advanced Search

• In advanced full-text search, you can also use the "all of these words" dropdown instead of AND or OR. For instance, a search for

  [all of these words] heart cardiac

  is equivalent to a search for heart AND cardiac and will find works with both terms, while

  [any of these words] heart cardiac

  is equivalent to heart OR cardiac and will find works with either one or both words.

  Examples:

   

 

For more help using the HathiTrust Digital Library, check their Using the Digital Library page

 

Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal highly regarded for its memory, wisdom, and strength. Trust is a core value of research libraries and one of their greatest assets. In combination, the words convey the key benefits researchers can expect from a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository.

• 17,090,441 total volumes
• 8,272,696 book titles
• 457,812 serial titles
• 5,981,654,350 pages
• 766 terabytes 202 miles
• 13,886 tons
• 6,511,087 volumes(~38% of total) in the public domain