5 OCT 2018 - 12:32 CET

• In the HathiTrust Digital Library, the Complutense has as partners the main libraries of the United States, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT...
• More than 8 million old books in consultation are guaranteed to be preserved for future generations.

The Complutense University of Madrid is one of the three non-American institutions that, together with the most important education organizations worldwide - Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, MIT...- participate in the great HathiTrust Digital Library project. A project whose objective is to ensure that digitized books of bibliographic heritage are not only disseminated, but preserved for future generations.

Ensuring preservation, combating technological obsolescence, the fragility of electronic files or accidents and natural disasters is something to which libraries devote a large part of their budgets.

To avoid these problems, the main North American libraries decided to join the world's largest, the Library of Congress of the United States, by creating a portal where the most valuable books could be accessed and preserved for future generations. This is how the HathiTrust Digital Library was created - from the indi language name of "elephant", a symbol of stability and robustness.

The project is of transcendental importance, since we are talking about more than 8 million books and hundreds of thousands of newspapers and magazines, a large part of which are at least 100 years old and cover a wide range of languages and subjects.

In order to do this, this great world library of electronic books meets the most demanding technical requirements and standards to ensure that no one alters its content, can adapt to the new formats that over the years will replace the current ones and be consulted in the future.

Among the libraries participating in this project are some of the most important educational institutions worldwide: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT... but there are only three non-American institutions, one of them being the Complutense University of Madrid.

The Complutense Library has 121,072 volumes of 77,496 works deposited in HathiTrust, which can also be consulted from its catalogue and other projects in which the institution participates, such as Hispana or Europeana.