As a result of cuts to the library’s budget, we are sorry to report that our membership to Hathitrust will expire on December 31, 2023. This post is intended to help those who have been using Hathitrust make any needed preparations for this change in membership before the end of the year.
What does this membership cancellation mean for researchers?
Because the Graduate Center Library has not had an operation to scan our print materials, the Graduate Center community has only had access to public domain works through our membership with Hathitrust.* What we can currently access within Hathitrust are public domain works, and that will remain the same even after our membership expires.
After December 31, we retain access to public domain works, but we will lose two features for these works:
- We will lose the ability to download a full PDF of an entire book or item at one time.
- You may download full book PDFs before December 31, 2023 using your GC credentials.
- In January 2024, we will still be able to download individual pages of every item in the public domain that is available on the Hathi interface.
- We will lose access to Collections already created in Hathitrust. If you are using the Collections feature, you will need to migrate your work.
- Individual items from Collections may be downloaded as full PDFs from your collections before December 31, 2023.
- Metadata for Collections can be exported from each Collection’s page under “Collection Tools” (and see the “metadata” section of this post for more details):
Hathitrust Research Center Tools
Most of The HathiTrust Research Center’s tools will continue to be accessible with an HTRC login which anyone can create. Only the Data Capsules (a cloud computing platform) will not be available.
Alternative Access
Hathitrust is available via the New York Public Library while on-site at a number of locations. NYPL also only offers full text downloads for public domain items–speak to an NYPL librarian while on-site for full login instructions. NYPL has participated in digitizing its collections for use in Hathitrust and has focused on making its public domain works available to all–approximately 89% of what has been scanned from NYPL are public domain works. See NYPL’s FAQ for more details.
Other nearby libraries may have Hathitrust memberships, but access to their in-copyright scanned materials would require authentication with credentials generated by that institution.
What we retain after December 31:
- The ability to search and read over three million public domain works within Hathitrust
- The ability to download individual pages from the Hathitrust platform
- Most HathiTrust Research Center’s tools will continue to be accessible with an HTRC login
For further conversation about this update, please reach out to your subject librarian.
*With the exception of special emergency access that was granted when our physical library was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
