The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries is pleased to announce that the public domain materials from HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org/about#) have been added to the Prospector union catalog.  HathiTrust is a partnership between major research institutions and libraries to preserve the cultural record and make them available to future generations.  Prospector has loaded the metadata for over 3 million public domain ebooks and they are accessible to all users of Prospector at no cost.  Users may read the ebooks online or download them in PDF format for local ebook readers.

The HathiTrust titles will appear in the general results panel of any search done in Prospector although users may limit their search to these materials by selecting the HathiTrust facet on the new Prospector interface.  When a HathiTrust title is found just click on the link that says “Digital File” and you will be taken to the e-resource.

HathiTrust began a number of years ago when Google started digitizing major research collations of libraries in North America.  As part of the project, Google agreed to share the ebooks with the participating libraries and these libraries have now expanded efforts to digitize even more.  Although the HathiTrust initiative has digitized an even greater number of titles, what is being opened up for general use are public domain titles which includes all material published before 1923 and also many government documents.