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HathiTrust Guide: Create Collections

This is a quick guide for students and faculty members who are interested in searching the HathiTrust digital library, building their own collections, as well as viewing and downloading PDFs.

What are Collections?

Collections are a way to group items around a theme, a topic, an author, a time period or any other option.

Some of the big advantages of these collections are the ability to:

  • Search the full text of items saved within a specific collection
  • Share these collections with others by making them public

Create Your Own Collections

HathiTrust Digital Library allows users to build their own collections.

How to create a collection?

  1. Log-in to HathiTrust
  2. Click on Collections on the top of the page
  3. Click on the Create a New Collection link
  4. Indicate whether the collection is private or public 
  5. Give your collection a name then click on ADD


 

I. Adding Individual items to your own collection/s

  1. Choose Catalog Search and conduct a search
  2. Choose the item you want
  3. Click on the "Catalog Record" of this item
  4. Click on the viewability option
  5. Go to the leftside of selected item, scroll to "ADD to Collection"
  6. Select a collection then click on Add
  7. Repeat the same process for any other item you want to add to your collection/s

II. Adding Multiple items to your own collection/s

  1. Choose Full Text Search and conduct a search
  2. Select the items you want by checking the box next to each item OR choose "Select all on page"
  3. Select a collection from the drop down menu on the top of the results and click on "Add Selected"

In HathiTrust go to Collections on the top of the page to do the following:

  1. Search for a specific collection
  2. Search within a collection

I. Search within a collection
Search for a collection, click on the collection title to display the list of items, then enter your keyword in the 'Search in this Collection" search box.
 

II. Search for a specific collection created by another user

Public Collections

You do not need to be logged-in to HathiTrust to view and search public collections.

These collections may be browsed by title, owner, last updated and number of items per collection and may be searched by keywords.

 

Have Questions! Need Help!

Confused about Logging-in, searching, downloading, etc.
 

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