The University of Tennessee, Knoxville is one of the newest members of HathiTrust, a partnership of more than 80 major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

As HathiTrust members, UT students, faculty, and staff gain:

• Online access to millions of public domain titles, including more than three million volumes not already in UT’s collections.

• The ability to create and save “virtual” collections for public or private use. Collection Builder allows users to create and save permanent or temporary collections that can be searched independently of the rest of the HathiTrust digital library.

• Better access for persons with print disabilities. UT students, faculty, and staff with print disabilities (such as vision impairments) also have online access to any UT-owned title (including in-copyright titles) in the HathiTrust digital library — more than 650,000 titles. These users may download a version of the title that is optimized for use with screen readers.

• A collaborative research center that supports digital scholarship. The HathiTrust Research Center is developing cutting-edge software and infrastructure to enable advanced computational access to digital texts in the HathiTrust library.

The UT Libraries gains a trusted repository for the long-term preservation of its holdings as well as persistent access to the digital collections.

“The Libraries are thrilled to be joining HathiTrust,” Holly Mercer, Associate Dean of Libraries for Scholarly Communication and Research Services, said. “The Libraries has a history of being committed to digital preservation and open access, and this partnership underscores our continued dedication to provide lasting access to scholarship.”

The Libraries’ new digital humanities librarian, Ashley Maynor, appreciates the potential benefits to UT scholars. “A number of UT’s faculty are already engaged in interesting digital projects: 3D visualization of ancient artifacts, data mining of historical texts,…. The tools under development at HathiTrust’s Research Center open up exciting new possibilities for both faculty and student scholars at UT,” says Maynor.

Since HathiTrust launched in 2008, partner libraries have contributed nearly 11 million volumes to the digital library.