“HathiTrust … is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than sixty partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form, preserving them securely to be accessed and used today, and in future generations.”

Mission and Goals (extract from Hathi Trust Site)

• To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a number of academic institutions.
• To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions.
• To help preserve these important human records by creating reliable and accessible electronic representations.
• To stimulate redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries, thus reducing long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of print collections.
• To create and sustain this “public good” in a way that mitigates the problem of free-riders.
• To create a technical framework that is simultaneously responsive to members through the centralized creation of functionality and sufficiently open to the creation of tools and services not created by the central organization.