You can use Summon to search for Public Domain material in HathiTrust. They will come up as e-books. You are also searching inside much of our print collection (books in the Library's catalog). This is because the HathiTrust also digitizes and searches in-copyright books - they cannot of course make them available online.
Thus if words or phrases searched by patrons appear in books we have in print, the catalog record for those print books will show up with the tag: “Why is this result here? Your query matched the indexed full text of this document.” You can then get the book from the stacks.
What Am I Linking To?
HathiTrust contains millions of digital books, journals, government documents, and other volumes, all digitized from research libraries. The collection includes both public domain and in-copyright works across a full range of subjects. Over half of the content is in English, but hundreds of languages are represented, including large amounts of material in German, French, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Although all items are discoverable, viewability depends on the rights status of the individual item. Detailed statistics on subjects and languages represented in HathiTrust may be found at: https://www.hathitrust.org/visualizations_callnumbers.
What Is A Catalog Search?
This is a search across the bibliographic data associated with the items within the HathiTrust repository.
What Is A Full Text Search?
This is a search of a word or term that occurs within the text of items across the entire HathiTrust repository. Also known as large scale search.
