Hathi Emergency Temporary Access Service: What Science was Accessed the Most?  The Indiana University Experience

By Robert Noel, Indiana University

As many of us are aware, the Hathi ETAS was launched shortly after the beginning of COVID-19, and lasted through August of 2021.  The service was designed to help researchers and students continue their access to “in copyright” content during the pandemic as libraries were closed, or open with limited hours.  For those universities that left the service on from April 2020 through August 2021, HathiTrust was able to supply those institutions with use data.

Indiana University has strong programs in music, languages, area studies, and the humanities in general, so it was no surprise that those subject areas dominated the top 300 books accessed by IU logins.  Like most libraries, the distribution of use of materials during a fixed time frame, when graphed, resulted in a pareto diagram, with a small number of titles getting very high, regular use, with a long tail of infrequently used or low demand titles.

The first science or math to show up was the 18^th most heavily accessed book, “Probability” by Jim Pitman.  This book is regularly used as a text for courses, and has been a Reserve print book at IU for several semesters.  It was accessed by 60 different IU users across IU campuses, with 108 online renewals.

The 30^th most heavily used resource was the old journal run “Electronics”, with 48 unique IU users accessing, and 3 renewals.  This is also a reminder that the Hathi ETAS did not simply include online books, it also included online journals, book sets, and book series.

At number 79 on our list was a 1946 “Adventures in Time and Space”, an anthology of modern science fiction stories, with 30 unique users and 6 renewals.

There is no doubt that other science monographs were heavily used online during the covid pandemic, it is just that IU users enjoyed access through means other than Hathi Emergency Access.  It is most likely that heavily used mathematics and computer science was delivered to students by digital libraries held by IU such as Skillport, the platform for the extremely high demand 3^rd edition of Cormen’s “Introduction to Algorithms” (MIT Press).  Others were presented to students via Proquest Ebook Central, EBSCO, and other providers.

The next mathematics book on the list (182^nd, with 19 unique users and 9 renewals) was Elementary and Middle School Mathematics, by Van de Walle, Karp, and Bay-Williams.  Again, this text was most likely required reading for School of Education students preparing to teach K-8 mathematics.

Below is a listing of the top 10 books access by IU users ranked according to number of unique IDs viewing.  There is no question that permitting access to these titles during the pandemic was a great benefit to both the institution, and the students and researchers working here.  If you have questions, or if your university made use of Hathi ETAS through last fall, and you have access to the use data and would like to compare or contrast your experiences with Indiana University, please feel free to contact me.

Top 10 Most Heavily Used ETAS Books by Indiana University
Title	Publisher / Year	Author	Unique IU Logins	Renewals
Creating Black Americans : African-American history and its meanings, 1619 to the present	Oxford Univ Press / 2006	Nell Irwin Painter	406	222
The encyclopedia of popular music	Oxford Univ Press / 2006	Colin Larkin	354	830
Conversation in the cathedral	Harper & Row / 1975	Mario Vargas Llosa	107	69
The new Rolling stone record guide	Random House / 1983	Dave Marsh, John Swenson	103	52
Love Medicine : a novel	Bantam Books / 1984	Louise Erdrich	96	89
Reading Modern Russian	Slavica Publishers / 1979	Jules F. Levin and Peter D. Haikalis, with Anatole A. Forostenko	93	50
Island of Dr. Moreau	Penguin/ 2005 [1896]	H.G. Wells	86	70
Dark continent : Europe’s twentieth century	A.A. Knopf / 1999	Mark Mazower	84	64
Chopin at the boundaries : sex, history, and musical genre	Harvard Univ Press / 1996	Jeffrey Kallberg	80	48
Engaging art : the next great transformation of America’s cultural life	Routledge / 2008	Steven J. Tepper, Bill Ivey	74	31

Bob Noel

Sciences Librarian

Liaison to Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics, School of Informatics

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405