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HathiTrust Digital Library

The HathiTrust is a partnership of libraries and other research institutions devoted to digitizing and preserving their collections and making them available online.

Searching HathiTrust

HathiTrust offers two ways of searching their content. 

  • A Full-text Search searches the full content of a book, including title, table of contents, the text itself, and any other sections. 
  • A Catalog Search searches a catalog record that lists basic bibliographic information, like title and publisher, as well as information about a book, such as subject terms. 

Each type of search offers a basic, Google-like keyword search option as well as an advanced search option.

Full-text Search

On the HathiTrust homepage the default search option is a Full-text search. This allows you to discover any instance of your search keywords in any digitized book of HathiTrust's collection. This will include items that are still protected by copyright, and therefore you cannot read them fully in HathiTrust. However, the full-text search will tell you which page(s) include your keywords. Check the FSU Libraries for either print or other ebook editions of the desired book to read it in full.

If you only want to see results for which the full-text is available to FSU users, click the check box for Full view only.

To access the Advanced search option click on 'Advanced Full-text Search' under the keyword search box.  Advanced search allows you to search for keywords in the full text and in specific parts of a book such as the title, author or series.  You can also limit your results by full-text availability, publication year, language and original format.

Catalog Search

Searching the HathiTrust catalog is similar to searching the FSU Libraries catalog.  The default search option on the HathiTrust homepage is a keyword search.  You can choose to search all fields or search certain fields, such as title or author.  You can click on 'Full view only' to search just those items available in full-text view.  

To access the advanced search option click on 'Advanced Catalog Search' under the keyword search box.  Advanced search allows you to search multiple fields at once.  You can also limit your results by full-text availability, publication year, language and original format.

Limiting Search Results

The results page for a Full-text Search and a Catalog Search will look the same.  On the left-hand side of the page is a section entitled 'Refine results' with several options for narrowing down the search results.  Options for limiting your results include subject, author, language, place of publication, date of publication, original format and original location.

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