Another 3,817,381 digitized records online

In an initial search of this online digital repository for some of the nation's great research libraries, I found over 11,000 items relating directly to the search term "genealogy." Quoting a news release earlier this year, "The HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership among some of the nation's largest academic research libraries, has launched a new digital catalog search that delivers nearly 3 million records through an Internet browser." Formed from a consortium of 12 universities, many of the books and records contain the full text. The consortium includes the following universities:

• California Digital Library
• Indiana University
• Michigan State University
• Northwestern University
• The Ohio State University
• Penn State University
• Purdue University
• University of California Berkeley
• University of California Davis
• University of California Irvine
• University of California Los Angeles
• University of California Merced
• University of California Riverside
• University of California San Diego
• University of California San Francisco
• University of California Santa Barbara
• University of California Santa Cruz
• The University of Chicago
• University of Illinois
• University of Illinois at Chicago
• The University of Iowa
• University of Michigan
• University of Minnesota
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• University of Virginia

This particular online collection has been in existence less than a year. Although some of the books do not appear with full text, they are still searchable. As you can see from the title to this post there are 3,817,381 volumes, comprised of 1,336,083,350 pages, consisting of 142 terabytes of information or 45 miles of shelf space or 3,102 tons of records with 604,450 volumes (~16% of total) in the public domain.

There seems to be no end to the number of digitized collections available to the genealogical community.