What follows is the second of three articles addressing available research resources written by Mark Vargas, SAH Board member and Director of Grants and Research at America’s Packard Museum.
Many aficionados of automotive history, like the members of SAH, look for sources of information on their topic. Often the search begins and ends on Google, or by contacting one or more auto museums or clubs. Yet there are far more effective ways of searching that can lead to spectacular results. A previous article provided details on WorldCat, and a future article will describe the Internet Archive. This article describes another valuable tool: HathiTrust.
Hathi is derived from hastin, the Hindi word for ‘elephant’, an animal famed for its long-term memory. The HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries, administered by the University of Michigan. HathiTrust grew from the Google Books Project of the early 2000s. At its peak, Google was scanning about 6,000 pages per hour from participating academic libraries. Following a series of copyright lawsuits, Google finished in 2017. Twelve major research libraries founded HathiTrust in 2008, grown to over 219 institutions worldwide, and provides access to the materials digitized by Google and the ongoing efforts by the members. Today, HathiTrust libraries collaborate on long-term management, preservation, and access of their collections and provide over 19 million digitized books, magazines and journals, newspapers, sheet music, journals, and government documents. It does not contain audio or visual files.
Copyright compliance is a major topic for HathiTrust members. Any items in the public domain are fully readable and downloadable, but there are strict limitations on copyrighted materials. Briefly, works are freely available in HathiTrust if they were published in the U.S. more than 95 years ago or published elsewhere in the world more than 125 years ago.
So, what does the HathiTrust do for you, the searcher? You do not need a membership or account to use HathiTrust; it is not a subscription service and does not license copyrighted content for lending purposes. The HathiTrust main search page is straightforward and simple to use. The resulting records will contain the name of the creator, a description, type of materials, dates, and when available, links to any online content. Anytime HathiTrust links to free, online sources you will always see a brown button saying, “Full View.” The temptation is always to jump to Full View, but I recommend also clicking on the button for “Catalog Record.” For example, I found the 1911 annual report for the Packard Motor Car Company. The Full View button takes you directly to the report, but Catalog View also provides links to all the other annual reports. All bibliographic data in HathiTrust links back to WorldCat.
Each bibliographic record contains the names and locations of the libraries that hold the physical item, so if you can plan a research trip well in advance. This data comes directly from WorldCat. You can create automatic APA and MLA citations to the materials.
As with WorldCat, the sheer volume of information in HathiTrust is both thrilling and daunting. For example, I found a 1919 series of lectures to the foremen at Packard (all 428 pages of fourteen sessions). Buried in the lectures were work rules, including no spitting on the floors (“a filthy practice”), aimless walking around, and no gambling. All reasonable enough unless you wanted to chew tobacco while walking to the craps game during lunch. Remarkably, female employees could not walk in pairs, and the wearing of cuffs or collars outside their uniform was prohibited.
As with WorldCat, there are challenges to using HathiTrust. First, the sheer volume of information can be formidable, and I find using the advanced search features immensely helpful, if not essential. Using the AND OR features in advanced searching is handy. For example, I have long been interested in early automotive safety measures. A simple search on “automobile accidents” resulted in over 630,000 full text items. Using the advanced search features quickly reduces the number of hits. I did find a grim 1931 report, Worse than War, from the Travelers Insurance Companies that noted 300 people died and 3,863 were injured in 1930 from runaway cars with no drivers. Men caused 94% of fatal accidents, but “whether the better driving record of women drivers as to fatalities is due to better driving, or not being behind the wheel for as many miles as men on the average, is not indicated by the records.” On a more uplifting note, you can find a humorous 1907 book of automotive poetry called “A Bunch of Horseless Nonsense,” written from the perspective of a cynical chauffeur, full of anecdotes on the transition from horse to automobile. “Fixed All Right” on page 12 reads just like a classic Buddy Hackett joke.
The second challenge, like with WorldCat, is the lack of automobile museum libraries that participate. Only major academic libraries are HathiTrust members, and they often did not collect much material pertaining to automobiles, so there can be a surprising dearth of materials available.
HathiTrust is a remarkable search tool that all members of SAH can use. It is comprehensive, free to use, and a great tool for finding remarkably rich universe of information. As with WorldCat, spending a little time on HathiTrust is worth your while, and research nirvana. Happy motoring and searching! (mv)