Navigating the Search Bar on the Main Page
You can access the search bar from every page of the website and digital library. Expand the search bar by clicking on the Search link in the site header. There are two basic options to begin your search:
Search the Website: Search the content of the HathiTrust information website using keywords. This DOES NOT include the digital library content that you find in the Collection.
Search the Collection: Search texts in the HathiTrust Digital Library collection using the methods listed below.
By default, your search results will include all the texts that are available to you to access online — known as “Full View” — limited by the search terms that you apply. These titles are available for you to access because they are in the public domain or licensed as open access. Once you reach the search results page, you can also include texts that are restricted by copyright in your search results by specifying “All Items” under "Item Viewability.”
Ways to search items in HathiTrust
Search Using Keywords
Keyword search allows you to search for topics, quotes, names, places, or phrases in both the information Website and the Collection.
Search Options in the Collection
When searching the Collection you can search Full Text & All Fields to search all the text of all the volumes in the entire digital library including book information such as Title or Author.
Narrow your search to only book information, such as Title, Publisher, and Author, by choosing All Fields indicated in the dropdown menu options.
Use other specific fields in the dropdown menu when you know the exact Title, Publisher, Author, or other book information.
Search Individual Collections: Search inside a featured, shared, or personal collection of works that you or others have created. (See Instructions below.)
Search in a Text: When reading a book, use keywords to search inside that volume alone. (See Instructions below.)
Other Search Tips
Boolean Searching:
Use AND and OR (capitalized) between words to combine them with Boolean logic: (heart OR cardiac) AND surgery will find works about heart surgery or cardiac surgery.
When searching in Full Text & All Fields, use a minus (-) to remove words from the result, e.g., heart -cardiac will find items containing the word heart that do not include the word cardiac.The word NOT isn’t available as a Boolean search term.
Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction"
Wildcards: Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to represent several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum; wom?n will find woman and women. Wildcard search is not available in Full Text & All Fields search.
If you would simply like to browse without entering a search term, you can enter * by itself.
Sorting Your Search Results
To sort your search results, please select one of the fields from the dropdown menu: for example, title, author, etc. If you search using “Full-Text & All Fields,” we don’t provide the sort capability because typically there are too many search results to make that feasible.
Advanced Search
Using Advanced Search, you may select multiple fields for a combined search enabling more detailed searching. Your options include Full Text & All Fields, All Fields, and other specific fields indicating book information.
Advanced Search Tips
All of these words
Treats your query as a boolean AND expression: heart cardiac will match fields containing heart AND cardiac
Any of these words
Treats your query as a boolean OR expression: heart cardiac will match fields containing either heart or cardiac.
This exact phrase
Treats your query as a phrase expression: occult fiction will match fields containing the phrase "occult fiction".
Using wildcards Catalog Index
Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to stand for several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum; wom?n will find woman and women. Wildcard search is not available in Full Text & All Fields search.
If you would simply like to browse without entering a search term you can enter * by itself.
Using the Full Text Index
Check the Always use the Full Text Index option to to display search results at the item level and to be able to add your search results to a collection.
Non-linguistic content, such as graphs, charts and illustrations, is not searchable currently.
You can search materials printed in a non-Latin alphabet. We have searchable text for volumes in a variety of non-Western scripts including Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. If you are having trouble searching a volume, please let us know by submitting a ticket from our website.
\uD83D\uDCD8 Instructions
Searching the full-text of a subset of materials
Create a personal collection of books that you would like to search within.
Search for keywords within your personal collection by using the search bar at the top of the page.
Searching within a text
The Search in a Text feature is available in the sidebar when you open a book. Enter your search terms in the search bar and then click the Submit Search magnifying glass icon.
We offer a number of features for searching within a book.
You can change the order in which search results are displayed: by page scan or by relevance.
You can turn search term highlighting on the book pages on or off as desired.
You can resize the sidebar by dragging the Close Sidebar icon to make the search results wider or narrower.
Search results can load in the sidebar so you can explore the search results while viewing the book pages at the same time. If you want your search results to appear in a separate tab, check the “Open result in a new window” checkbox before submitting your search terms.
You can clear your search if you’re done with searching in the text, or you can just minimize that section in the sidebar by clicking on “Search in this Text.”