HathiTrust Discovers Serials Solutions’ Summon and Vice Versa

HathiTrust, a massive digital repository for books and serials digitized from major research libraries, will open its collection to the popular Summon discovery service from ProQuest’s Serials Solutions. In 2010, HathiTrust introduced its full-text searching system for its more than 8.4 million items, including both public domain and in-copyright material. Sometime this summer, Summon will begin offering full-text access through its discovery service with content matched to individual library holdings. At the same time, the 2.25 million public domain items in the HathiTrust digital library will become reachable through Summon for access and/or downloading. In effect, the currently 200-plus Summon libraries will have added both full-text access to large portions of their existing print collections and significantly increased their ebook collections with millions of public domain items. Later this summer, HathiTrust plans to enhance its own full-text searching with new features and, at the same time, possibly offer access to other discovery services.