HathiTrust Provides Emergency Temporary Access to Half of UNL’s Book Collection

The COVID-19 crisis has made the collections of many research libraries around the United States physically inaccessible, including the more than 3 million volumes in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library. Fortunately the HathiTrust Digital Library, a digital repository that provides long-term preservation and access services for millions of books and journals digitized from its member libraries’ collections, has granted UNL Libraries emergency, expanded temporary access to materials in its collection. Now UNL students, faculty and staff will have full-text access to 50 percent of UNL Libraries’ collection digitally, including those materials that are copyright protected.

The UNL Libraries, a longstanding member of the HathiTrust community, was one of 110 libraries that applied for the Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS). Claire Stewart, Dean of Libraries, and Casey Hoeve, Associate Professor and Head of Content & Collections, worked on the ETAS application on UNL’s behalf.  

“I know how frustrating this is for our faculty and students to not have access to physical materials,” explained Stewart, “that is why we are excited to announce that the HathiTrust Digital Library is temporarily expanding access for our users during this emergency and at least half our collection will be available online.”

The main features of the emergency access are:

●        Continued access to the physical scholarly record — UNL’s print collection — via digital copies in HathiTrust.

●        Reading access to books online, within a web browser (no full downloads).

●        Ability to “check out” a copy for 60 minutes, with an auto-renew feature for books in active use, and with a maximum use time of 2 hours. Access to items is 1-1. For example, if we have two copies in our collection, two UNL users (faculty, staff, students) will be allowed concurrent access to the digital item in HathiTrust.

Since approval, Hoeve and others have developed a libguide that provides UNL faculty and students easy-to-follow login procedures and additional information about the HathiTrust Digital Library and ETAS. 

To search for HathiTrust (Expanded) online materials:

• visit the HathiTrust digital library
• click or tap LOG IN
• select "University of Nebraska-Lincoln" from the drop-down menu
• click or tap CONTINUE

You will be prompted to log in with your UNL Credentials.

The Libraries ASKus chat is open to assist anyone having trouble searching the digital library and staff at the Law Library can be reached at lawref@unl.edu.