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 www.hathitrust.org 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.