If you enjoy poking around used bookstores searching for antiquated tomes on obscure subjects just for fun, or if you're seeking a specific title of some long out of print book such as "The reliques of Father Prout, late P. P. of Watergrasshill, in the county of Cork, Ireland," or if, like me, you enjoy pursuing genealogical research, you might — nay, you will — be interested in the Hathi Trust Digital Library.
You may miss the sneeze-inducing smell of musty old books and the feel of crumbling leather bindings, but the scanned copies of original pages can provide a virtual "Ye Olde Bookstore" experience. And best of all--unlike the virtual experience provided by online games — it's free! Indeed, even though there is a LOGIN button, you really don't have to become a member or log in to utilize the site.
The following excerpt is from their Welcome page:
"Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests."
The online scanned copies (aka "Full View") are only of books that are in the Public Domain, and of course not every book in the World has been scanned. Some books may be "searchable" but have not been scanned, but there is a "Find in Library" feature too.
Since everyone on E2 is computer literate, I'm not going to give instructions on how to navigate the site, zooming, etc. (for those who do RTFM, the site does have the usual Help and Search Tips links), but I will mention a few issues I have experienced:
- Some books have been digitized by several Libraries, and some, perhaps due to the quality of the copy they digitized, are better than others. So you might want to click on "Catalog Record" to see if multiple copies are available.
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The OCR scanning is sometimes not quite accurate, especially on older books with "funky" fonts, and therefore some text searches may not work. Searches for partial text strings also do not work. As an example, for genealogical purposes, searching "Van Antwerp" will not show any results for "Van Antwerpen," so if the book has an index you might want to double-check to make sure you get all the results.
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If you desire, you can "View Plain Text" rather than scrolling scanned pages, however the OCR issue mentioned above can sometimes cause undesirable results.
To get started: just Google "Hathi Trust."