"The HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership among some of the US’s largest academic research libraries, has announced a service that is expected to transform how researchers use the more than 1.6 billion pages (4.6 million volumes) in its collections.

The service allows for full-text searching capabilities across the entire library. Researchers can now search public domain and in-copyright works by keyword or phrase. Based on open source Solr/Lucene technology, the service expands on an experimental search of public domain volumes, introduced in November 2008. Full-text search will continue to be supported across the repository as it grows at a rate of hundreds of thousands of volumes every month.

In combination with the HathiTrust Digital Library’s carefully curated bibliographic data, the new functionality allows researchers to more efficiently locate items relevant to their research. It also lays the foundation for future services such as full-text search with faceted browsing, advanced search, ‘more like this’ options, and tools that can be used in computational research.

HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org) is a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia. It currently includes digitised volumes from the University of Michigan, University of California, Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin. The HathiTrust partners seek to develop the repository and its services to meet the long-term needs of their academic communities, and offer a unique resource on the Web for scholarship and research."
 

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