The number of US government documents in HathiTrust changes quite frequently, as new items are contributed and existing items are determined to be US government documents. Statistics are generated monthly, and can be found on the Federal Documents Program page.
All materials in HathiTrust, whether we have determined them to be in the public domain or not, are available for bibliographic and full-text search. US government documents that we have determined to be in the public domain are viewable by anyone, and, at a minimum, individual pages can be downloaded. A large number of US government documents are free of any restrictions and can be downloaded in their entirety. Many government documents are subject to third party restrictions placed by the digitizing entity and are only available to download by those affiliated with a HathiTrust member library. See HELP for more information.
There are several reasons why a US government document may be ‘Limited (search-only)’. They include:
- The item contains a copyright statement.
- The items (usually serials) were originally issued by government agencies, and then privatized. More recent issues will not be available for Full View.
- The bibliographic record that was contributed along with the digitized item does not identify the item as a US federal government document (see bibliographic rights determination).
If you believe that an item is a US government document and should be opened for Full view, please contact HathiTrust via the Feedback link on the same page as the record, or by emailing support@hathitrust.org.
More information about depositing content can be found at Getting Content Into HathiTrust and Guidelines for Digital Object Deposit. Please contact support@hathitrust.org with any questions.
No. Libraries may engage in non-destructive scanning of US government documents, or what is known as destructive scanning, where the binding of volumes is cut so the individual sheets can be fed through a scanner. However, libraries that engage in destructive scanning send duplicate copies of materials for scanning, so that at least one print copy is retained. Libraries may deaccession US government documents from their collections, but when this is done, it is done through established disposition processes and channels. HathiTrust is not currently acting as a federal depository library.
Yes, many libraries have digitized and deposited state and local government documents. Because the rights status of these documents varies from state to state, there is variation in whether the materials can be viewed in HathiTrust. We have a targeted program currently to review the rights status of these documents.
HathiTrust contains US government documents from a wide variety of agencies, with dates spanning 1790 to 2016. In order to better define the current content, and inform future needs, HathiTrust has embarked upon a project to create a Registry of US Government Documents.
Please click on the ‘Feedback’ link, found on the top of each page on our website, to report a problem, or email support@hathitrust.org. Often, the problem can be corrected. For more information, please review the HathiTrust Policy on Quality.