Founded in 2008 by a collaborative of the universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance), and the University of California system, HathiTrust preserves 17+ million digitized print items. Of these, 6.7 million titles are in the public domain or are Creative Commons-licensed works and available with no reading charges to everyone.

Additionally, through this temporary arrangement, Indiana University students, faculty, and staff will now log in to HathiTrust to read copyrighted titles in the collection that IU Libraries owns in print format. This will make 1.73 million additional items available while the collection is closed for print circulation. 

Users will be able to read the book online in the web browser, but will not be able to download the work in full.  Check out periods are in one-hour increments, which can be extended as long as another user has not requested access.

HathiTrust members steward this collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly interests. The books accessed through Emergency Temporary Access Service are made available under the fair use sections of the United States Copyright Act. Copyright protections still exist for many of these books.