How HathiTrust is better than Google Books

Describing how the Library of Congress researcher card provides access to important resources (https://matthewbgilmore.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/unexpected-uses-of-your-library-of-congress-researcher-card-hathitrust-digital-library/) raises the question of why and in what way are those resources valuable–and worth using rather than simply relying on Google Books.

Why Library of Congress-sponsored access to HathiTrust is valuable and worth the effort–here are a number of links to

Features	Google Books Project	HathiTrust
Numbers	15 million items.	13 million items and is growing.
Content Type	Books, journals, magazines, reports, and government documents.	Books, journals, magazines, reports, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, government documents and more.
Organization	Google owns the Google Book Project and decides how to manage it.	Partnership of libraries and institutions, with membership and shared governance. Membership needed to download titles in the public domain
Full-Text Search	Full-text search within all the content. Browse to sections containing the search terms.	Full-text search within all the content. Display pages where terms are found.
Full-Text Download	Full-text download of the whole item for those items that are out of copyright.	Full-text download for members of HathiTrust of the whole item for those items that are out of copyright.

Excerpts:

The content in HathiTrust is more scholarly because of its focus on content from research libraries;
The HathiTrust metadata is rich and structured;
The HathiTrust search interface is more sophisticated and comprehensive, making use of facets which can be used to refine search results quickly, including limiting searches to public domain content (“Full View” search);
Because of the various approaches they are taking with copyright, more HathiTrust content is identified as public domain and fully viewable;
HathiTrust partners are providing locally digitized materials and/or content that may have been part of other digitization initiatives – content that is not included in Google Books or Open Library;
Some library vendors are working to integrate their online resources with HathiTrust; for example HW Wilson links to HathiTrust public domain content from: Book Review Digest Retrospective, Essay & General Literature Index, and Short Story Index Retrospective;

Washington DC History Resources