For ATRS Contacts: How to Fulfill Patron Requests

After you’ve successfully completed the registration process, your designated contact(s) will be able to respond to requests for copyrighted materials from eligible patrons.

1. Confirm eligibility of patron

After receiving a request from a patron for a copyrighted book in the HathiTrust Digital Library, follow your organizational practices to confirm that the patron is eligible to receive this service as a blind or print disabled user.

2. Access the materials

In order to access materials, you must use the secure method configured above to gain access to copyrighted (limited search-only) books.

  • Service providers who signed up with multi-factor authentication will be asked to authenticate with the second factor only when accessing copyrighted (limited search-only) books.
  • Service providers who signed up with a static, non-NAT IP address will only be able to access this service while using the computer at the location you registered with in the steps above. If it is a laptop, it must be connected to a persistent IP address. This may require that it be docked at your office location.

The following steps will allow you to access the full view of all copyrighted materials in HathiTrust, once you’ve received a request from an eligible user.

A demonstration of how to switch your role in the interface and download a book is also available in this recording of a webinar.

  1. Open HathiTrust in your web browser.
  2. Select “LOG IN.”
  3. In the “Select your institution” drop-down menu, select your institution.
  4. When prompted, enter the username and password you use to log into services at your university.
  5. Arrive at “Search HathiTrust’s digital library” on the HathiTrust main page.
  6. In the header, select “Member”. A page will load, prompting you to “Choose a role.”
  7. Select the radio button for “Accessible Text Request Service (ATRS)” Provider” and select the “Submit” button.
  8. Find the book that the patron requested, either by using the url they provided or by using HathiTrust’s search functionality.
  9. In Search Results, locate the item you wish to access. Select the “Full View”, “Limited (search-only)”, or “Temporary Access” link to open the book, or select the “Catalog Record” link to view the record and all associated items.
  10. The book pages should now load in your browser, with a banner message along the top that reads “This work may be in copyright. You have full view access to this item based on your account privileges. Information about use can be found in the HathiTrust Access and Use Policy.”
  11. You can now download the book in the desired format for your user (see next section).
  12. When you have finished downloading the book(s) requested by your eligible users, you can return to browsing HathiTrust for other uses by selecting “ATRS” in the header bar and selecting the radio button for “Member.”

3. Download the book

After finding the book requested by the patron, you can choose to download the book in either text-only or PDF format.

Text-only version

The text-only version will contain OCR that has been created by automated tools and has not been corrected. Depending on the quality of the original book and the OCR process, the quality of the OCR text may vary. Chapters or headings are not tagged in this format.

To download the text-only version, when the “Special Access” Dialogue Box appears, select “text-only version” link to proceed to the HTML text version of the item. To download the file, use your web browser to “Save Page As” and select a text format and file extension.

PDF version

The PDF version will contain the images of the book pages, with the OCR text embedded within the PDF file. Chapter or section headings may be tagged in the PDF. You can extract the OCR text using a tool like Adobe Acrobat, which will allow you to export to a different file format. You may also wish to run your own OCR tool against the PDF file, such as Adobe tools or ABBYY FineReader.

To download the PDF version, when the “Special Access” Dialogue Box appears, select “OK” to proceed. On the Item full view page, select “Download whole book (PDF)” under “Get This Book.” When the PDF dialogue completes, select “Download PDF.”

4. Distribute the book to the patron

Provide the item to the patron in accordance with the terms of access in your registration agreement. Remind them of the Terms of Use by which they are permitted to use the book.

After they’ve received the file, delete the file from your own computer. Alternatively, if you have edited, corrected, reformatted, or otherwise transformed the file after downloading it from HathiTrust, please contact us about the possibility of depositing that transformed copy for future use by other eligible patrons.

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