As of April 7, HathiTrust has made available to the University of California Libraries the Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) to provide students, faculty, and staff online reading access to materials that are currently physically unavailable to them in their library collections. All users continue to have access to more than 6.7 million public domain and Creative Commons-licensed works. By offering this service, HathiTrust intends to help continue to support teaching and research at institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ETAS is available by request to all HathiTrust member libraries located in the U.S. that have experienced an unexpected or involuntary, temporary disruption to normal operations, requiring the library to be closed to the public, or otherwise to have restricted print collection access services. HathiTrust uses a request process to verify that the library meets these qualifications and to record information about the expected duration of need.
HathiTrust’s careful and measured approach to this service conforms to fair use under U.S. copyright law, in order to help students, teachers, and researchers continue to do their vital work.