Susan Hayya, Penn State University Libraries’ coordinator for Adaptive Technology and Services and a long-time champion of services for individuals with disabilities, has been designated Penn State’s proxy for HathiTrust users with print disabilities. Through this program, eligible users at HathiTrust partner institutions will receive special access to in-copyright materials contained in HathiTrust, rather than having to physically search for the items through another library or store.

The HathiTrust is a cooperative shared digital repository using the Google Books project collections—now with upwards of 10 million books accessible online. It was developed at the University of Michigan, a member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic arm of the Big Ten Conference. For out-of-copyright books in the public domain, there is access to the full text of the book online through both Google Books and the Hathi Trust. Books still in copyright are not freely available online to the general public, but with the new proxy service, they will be accessible to individuals with disabilities. HathiTrust is in the process of naming proxies for more than 80 universities to use this service.

For more information about the program, see: http://www.hathitrust.org/accessibility

For more information about the services at Penn State, contact Susan Hayya at shh2@psu.edu or 814-865-0284.