HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries that preserves and provides lawful access to the published scholarly and cultural record. Founded in 2008 by the 12 universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the 11 libraries of the University of California, it has grown into a global partnership that today stewards more than 19 million digitized items.
Its mission is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. The corresponding vision positions HathiTrust as a vital catalyst for emerging forms of research, teaching, and learning that engage the scholarly and cultural record.
Core goals include building a reliable, comprehensive, co-owned digital library from member print collections; dramatically improving access—especially for users with print disabilities; developing cost-effective infrastructure for digitized books and born-digital materials; and creating partnerships that safeguard both the digital collection and the broader print and digital scholarly record.
Governance is member-driven. A Board of Governors elected by the membership holds strategic and fiduciary responsibility, supported by a Program Steering Committee and various working groups. The University of Michigan serves as the administrative and legal host. More than 200 research and academic libraries participate, contributing content, expertise, and annual membership fees that fund operations.
Services center on the HathiTrust Digital Library itself, which offers reading access to the fullest extent permitted by U.S. and international copyright law, full-text search across the entire corpus, and text-and-data-mining tools through the HathiTrust Research Center. Additional programs address shared print retention and temporary emergency access for member institutions.
The organization emphasizes collaboration, transparency, and curiosity as the foundation for a new era of scholarship. By pooling resources that no single library could sustain alone, HathiTrust strengthens the resilience of the academic library community and ensures long-term, non-commercial stewardship of the digitized record of human knowledge.