The Covid-19 pandemic has forced students and scholars from around the world to rely more heavily on digital resources, and Claremont Colleges’ students, faculty, and staff are no exception. In addition to our many eBook and online journal offerings, the Library was able to expand our digital offerings by participating in HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service. Between April and September 2020, Claremont students, faculty, and staff have accessed over 3,000 unique titles of digitized print books made available via HathiTrust’s emergency program.
The top 10 most accessed titles during this time period were used over 25 times each, for a total of 321 times (course reading titles are starred):
- Evaluation: Methods for Studying Programs and Policies / Carol H. Weiss
- A People’s History of the United States / Howard Zinn
- The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers* / Robert L. Heilbroner
- Who Pays the Price?: The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis / edited by Barbara Rose Johnston
- Huellas de las literaturas hispanoamericanas / John F. Garganigo
- Physics* / David Halliday
- Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America* / Jennifer Lee
- An Introduction to the World’s Oceans / Alyn C. Duxbury
- Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century / Lawrence Foster
- Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History* / R. Keith Schoppa
The Claremont Colleges Library has been a member of HathiTrust since 2016. HathiTrust is a collaborative academic library repository focused on digitizing and long-term preservation of library collections. After the colleges moved to remote teaching and learning in March 2020, the Library joined the newly established HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service. This service provides digital access to titles in the print collections of libraries that needed to close due to the pandemic and are unable to loan their print copies. Through this program we are able to make over 50% of our print collection available online to our users.
In order to participate in this service we have committed to not loan any print titles that are made temporarily available online via this HathiTrust Service. This commitment allows us to uphold copyright by loaning only one copy at a time of a book that we own, which in this case is the digital surrogate temporarily provided by HathiTrust. Since nearly all of The Claremont Colleges’ courses are currently being taught online, the Library’s continued participation in this service is providing much wider access to our collections than would be possible otherwise. This service supplements our efforts to purchase an eBook copy of a requested title whenever possible (keep in mind that not all titles are published as an eBook and not all publishers sell eBooks to libraries) and our mailing or pickup services for print books.