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E-Books for Visual Arts: HathiTrust Collections

Guide to the many E-Book resources available for art and architecture.

HathiTrust Collection Builder

HathiTrust offers a great tool for building your own collections inside the digital library, allowing you to group items together for private research or public use.  One of the biggest advantages of these collections is the ability to search the full-text of items within a specific collection allowing you to focus searches on subsets of HathiTrust materials.


To view collections that have been made public by other HathiTrust users, you do not need to be logged in.  From the HathiTrust homepage click on the “View Public Collections” link, which will take you to a long list of public collections of HathiTrust materials.  Each collection is available for browsing and full-text searches, however you cannot edit these collections.


 Here is how you build your own collections:

  • Click login at the top-right of the Collections page.
  • Go to the My Collections link in the navigation bar - here you can edit a collection you have already built or start a new one from scratch.  
  • Add an item to a new or existing collection from the PageTurner interface for a particular item, add an item from the search results page in “Full-text Search”. 
    • In the PageTurner, the collection building feature is in the left sidebar.
    • In the Full-text Search, items in the results list can be selected using the check boxes next to each item and added to a collection using the drop-down menu at the top of the list.

Collections Built inside HathiTrust

The Haas Arts Library has put together several collections inside the HathiTrust Digital Library.  These public collections only contain items that are owned by Yale University Libraries, and which are mostly full-view in HathiTrust. Consider these collections as a starting point for subject specific research.  


NOTE: You will find that there are very few art & architecture items inside HathiTrust.  There are two main reasons for this:

  1. Copyright: A lot of art and architecture materials contain copyrighted information from multiple sources.
  2. Lack of Digitization: Unfortunately there is not a lot of money or interest in digitizing art & architecture materials. 

 Haas Collections inside HathiTrust:

Yale Arts Library - Architecture

Yale Arts Library - Art History

Yale Arts Library - General Arts

Yale Arts Library - Catalogs

Yale Arts Library - Painting

Yale Arts Library - Sculpture