There’s an elephant in the library. This slogan refers to HathiTrust, a shared repository of digitized books. Over 5 million books are in the repository and it is growing everyday. The books are both scanned and machine transcribed (optical character recognition) so it is possible to search every word in every book – all in one search. That’s a lot of words. Say 200 billion.
Sometimes I find it more useful to search a limited collection of books. This week I created a collection called Trees of Hawaii. First I created a guest account at the University of Michigan. Very easy. Then I started searching the HathiTrust catalog for books of possible interest. As I found them, I put them into my collection. A collection can be either private or public. Finally I searched my collection for the word Reynoldsia. Now I know which of the books in my collection mention Reynoldsia and on which pages. Sometimes the full text of the book is available and I can read all about it online. Sometimes not. But I certainly know which books to pursue. Thanks Elephant!
This book is at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015048991361
If you would like help creating an account, please contact Lee Ann at 822-3609.