(PDF version)

Libraries
by Ann
Wolpert

Public
Services
by Steve Gass

Collection Services
by Carol Fleishauer

Administrative Services
by James Mullins

Technology Planning and Administration
by MacKenzie Smith

Appendix A

About Us > Annual Reports

MIT Libraries
Annual Report FY 2002-2003

Technology Planning and Administration

Technology continues to underpin much of the Libraries’ work – supporting our business operations, our many services to the MIT community of scholars, and increasingly our actual collections. 2003 saw notable activity on all these fronts, and more. Nearly every department of the Libraries has identified technology-related projects that they want to undertake, requiring support and guidance from the Libraries’ technology experts. Increasingly the Libraries’ biggest asset, the collection of information resources we manage, make available, and preserve, are digital and online. During 2003, the technology directorate of the Libraries reorganized to improve our ability to effectively support this increased demand, while at the same time leveraging the success of our new digital library research program. These are exciting times for those of us involved with applying technology in libraries — the opportunities to reinvent ourselves are inspiring, and MIT is at the center of it all.

SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY SERVICES

This has been a year of tremendous change for the Libraries' production technology operation. The former Systems Office group morphed into a full-blown Systems and Technology Services Department (STS), occupying a newly-renovated space in the Hayden basement, consolidating and restructuring staff lines dedicated to technology but formerly distributed throughout the system, and adding two additional staff members. A new head was appointed to the department, Nina Davis-Millis, formerly the Acting Associate Director for Public Services, and Information Technology Librarian for Public Services in the MIT Libraries. Nina brings a wealth of experience with the Libraries’ core services, and a strong commitment to its strategic goal of “excellence in providing rapid, easy, and precise access to high quality information for education and research at MIT.”

At the same time that we were reorganizing our technical support, we put in place structures to broaden participation in and engagement with technology projects throughout the Libraries. In collaboration with the Libraries senior management group, the Library Council, a process has been defined for setting system-wide priorities for projects requiring significant involvement of STS staff. This process serves to ensure that our time is devoted to the projects most valuable to the Libraries as a whole, and enables us to better manage our time and bring projects to successful completion. To further assist in this goal a new Technology Advisory Group was established, composed of representatives from each department and from STS.

The Libraries remain committed to a decentralized support model for the specific technology-related needs of both individual staff and their departments, with Local Technology Experts reporting to library units but receiving training and support from Library Technology Consultants who work in Systems and Technology Services.

Throughout the year we have been grateful for the support and collaboration of many colleagues from Information Systems. It is worth noting that our connections span IS's entire organizational structure, and strongly suggests the depth and significance of our relationship, and the commitment of the Libraries' STS department to our role as a participatory and contributive member of the Institute's IT community.

Production Systems

• 2003 saw many improvements to Barton, the Libraries’ collection management and online catalog system, including a new user interface and new features to support personalization by users. Better reporting facilities were implemented, allowing us to better understand how our collections and services are being used. We are also working on new disaster recovery plans that will ensure the continuation of this critical system under any circumstances.
• The Libraries public web site was improved and extended. Use of our public site continues to increase, pointing to the growing reliance of library patrons on the Web as a primary means of reaching us. Usability testing for this and other Web-based interfaces continues to be a high priority and important service of Systems staff.
• Security threats to our computer servers and desktop machines continues to rise, requiring newer and better maintenance to prevent service outages or compromised information resources.
• During 2003 the Systems staff helped to plan and set up the Libraries’ new Digital Instruction Resource Center (DIRC,) a state-of-the-art twenty-one workstation training room for using the Libraries resources.
• And we continue to work on ways to improve support for local staff computer use, and to streamline their ability to acquire necessary equipment.

New Technology Projects.

• STS staff who are technology consultants and project management specialists are involved in a range of new projects with various departments, from looking for better ways to capture e-metrics for the use of our collections, to implementing innovative digital reference services to support patrons wherever they are. We participate in a dozen of these projects in any year, and are beginning to see even greater efficiencies in our ability to move these projects forward.
• As an example of this, in 2003 the Libraries implemented a new online service, called SFX, which supports online linking among the growing list of full-text resources to which the Libraries provide access to the MIT community, thereby increasing the use of these valuable assets.
• As another example, STS staff began collaborating with staff from the Rotch Visual Collections to identify and implement a new system for cataloging visual images used by MIT’s faculty for teaching and research, thus broadening the reach and value of these collections.

DIGITAL LIBRARY RESEARCH GROUP

At the same time we created the Systems and Technology Services department, we formed another group in the technology area to manage the growing need for, and success of, an active applied research program in digital library development. These are times of dramatic change for libraries and archives due largely to the rapid deployment of technology throughout research universities, and indeed the world. The MIT Libraries are uniquely positioned to help the research library community understand and respond to these new opportunities and external forces, and the Digital Library Research Group is well on its way to filling that role. The research group directly addresses the Libraries’ strategic goal of “being a leader among academic research institutions in the use of applied library technology,” and is currently working on, or has recently completed, five projects in FY03, accounting for nearly a million dollars in additional research funding.

DSpace

The past year has been one of major accomplishment for the Libraries’ DSpace project, a joint development effort with Hewlett Packard to create an easy-to-use and freely available computer system which services as a digital repository for the long-term management and preservation of the MIT faculty’s digital research output – including their research papers, digital images, multimedia material, datasets, and teaching material. The live DSpace@MIT service went live in the fall of 2002 to the MIT campus, and the DSpace open source system was publicly released on November 4, 2002 with a very successful launch event — a symposium on scholarly communication and the ways in which libraries can address significant problems with initiatives like DSpace, documented on video (digitally, of course!) at http://mitworld.mit.edu/.

Within MIT the DSpace service continues to grow and take shape. We began the service with five “early adopter” communities from around campus, and spent the year working with them to improve the system and to add more of their material to it. We have actively marketed the service to a number of other communities, and expect the coming year to show dramatic increase it its adoption throughout MIT. Thanks to effective marketing and advocacy strategies, the DSpace service is now familiar throughout MIT and we’re beginning to see the innovative uses to which the faculty may put it. Our experiences within MIT are informing research universities worldwide who wish to build similar services at their institutions, and our leadership is evident in the number of research projects that are spinning out from this initial effort.

Cambridge/MIT Institute (CMI)

The Digital Library Research Group has received funding from the Cambridge/MIT Institute for a number of projects building on the DSpace work. Last summer, two members of the group, both senior business strategists, undertook a study of the value of digital repositories like DSpace, and the subsequent preservation of well-managed digital research assets, within the UK. Following from that project we are undertaking two additional projects: DSpace@Cambridge, a project to implement an institutional repository for digital research material at Cambridge University using the DSpace system, and LEADIRS (LEarning About Digital Institutional Repositories Seminars), an innovative series of seminars to help higher education and further education institutions in the UK to develop their own plans for creating an institutional repository service (using DSpace or other software of their choosing). CMI is a strong supporter of the DSpace vision – the curation, management, preservation, and distribution of valuable digital research assets – and they are investing significantly in our success.

The DSpace Federation

In January of 2003 the group began a project to extend the DSpace concept within North America with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Six major US and Canadian research libraries are collaborating with MIT to explore the use of DSpace at their own institutions and work with us to improve the system, the service model, and the understanding of whether and how institutional repositories will be adopted by a range of research institutions. These “early federators” include Columbia University, Cornell University, Ohio State University, and the Universities of Rochester, Toronto, and Washington.

In addition to these formal partnerships, the DSpace system has been downloaded by approximately 4,000 other institutions worldwide, of which more than one hundred have indicated interest in using the system to create their own institutional repository along the MIT model. In the eight months since the public release of the system there are half a dozen other institutions running live DSpace systems (in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Germany, the US, and Portugal), and many more are slated to become available this fall. In a very short time DSpace has become one of the most well-known and widely cited systems in use by libraries in the world!

SIMILE

Following on the success of the initial DSpace development project, Hewlett Packard, under the auspices of the HP/MIT Alliance, has funded a new project to take DSpace in new and important directions. SIMILE is a three-year project led by David Karger, a faculty member in the MIT Lab for Computer Science, the WorldWideWeb Consortium or W3C (also at the Lab for Computer Science), HP Labs, and the MIT Libraries’ Digital Library Research Group. The project seeks to extend support in DSpace for rich, customized metadata using W3C standards such as RDF and the Semantic Web. A project of this nature could both prove the utility of these W3C technologies as well as provide a critical breakthrough in digital library functionality. Because of the adoption of DSpace by research institutions worldwide, SIMILE’s improvements to the DSpace platform will have immediate channels to a key audience of early adopters of advanced Web technologies.

OTHER INITIATIVES

During the summer and fall of 2002 the Libraries undertook to assist MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative with a thorough analysis of their “metadata” requirements (the information about OCW’s teaching material which will allow it to be managed, located, and preserved in the future). Staff from the Libraries’ technology and collection services groups worked together with OCW and Sapient staff to define and implement OCW’s content management system, leading to a newly-designed OCW production system and workflow. This effort also led to the creation of a new unit in the Libraries to provide ongoing support for OCW’s metadata, and other innovative projects at MIT in the future.

Technology staff have also worked with the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative to consider how next-generation course management systems should interoperate with library systems and services to provide our information resources to the classroom, and to manage teaching material over time.

Beyond MIT, the Libraries have this year joined the Digital Library Federation, a group of leading US research libraries who are leading development of digital libraries. DLRG staff also participated in several major national initiatives in this area: the architecture of the Library of Congress’s new National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and the Electronic Records Administration program of the National Archives. Our experience with both DSpace and other digital library and archiving research are proving to be of great value to an area of growing national concern.

CONCLUSION

2003 was a year of enormous progress on many aspects of technology-related activities in the Libraries, from our mission-critical production systems and use of desktop computers, to our growing role in the international digital library research agenda. The coming year will offer even further challenges and opportunities as we increase the number of technology-related projects we undertake and scale up our research program. MIT Libraries’ leadership in the area of technology use in libraries is firmly established, as befits an institution of MIT’s stature in this area.

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology