NEW YORK, NY.- The New York Public Library has taken a giant step towards storing, preserving and protecting its digitized book collections, partnering with HathiTrust, a shared repository of digitized content from academic and research libraries.

NYPL is the 27th library to join the partnership, which was formed in 2008 and counts the Columbia University Library and the University of California’s library system as fellow partners.

“The New York Public Library could not be more excited about its partnership with HathiTrust, which will become an essential element of our digitization strategy,” said Ann Thornton, Acting Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries.

"This partnership will allow us to preserve and protect our digitized books for future generations while making them more accessible and useful to readers worldwide,” she said. “By adding our digitized book collections to those of the other Hathi partners, we take a major step toward the vision of a free, comprehensive library of the world's knowledge. We look forward to a long, productive future with HathiTrust and all of the great libraries who count themselves partners.”

HathiTrust will take items digitized from the New York Public Library’s collections and store them securely. The group also has a delivery platform that will allow the public to easily access the Library’s public domain books, as well as items from the collections of other HathiTrust partners.

“We are excited to welcome New York Public Library as our newest partner,” said John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust. “NYPL’s perspective as one of the world’s greatest public research libraries and their distinctive collections will deeply enrich the HathiTrust partnership and the materials we make available to researchers around the world.”