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About Us > Annual Reports

MIT Libraries
Annual Report FY 2004-2005

Director, Libraries

Academic year 2005 marks the 60th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's legendary essay "As We May Think". In this watershed paper, published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, Bush challenged his fellow scientists and engineers to turn their post-war attention to the task of "making more accessible [the] bewildering store of knowledge".

The problem for scientists and engineers, as Bush saw it, was not that too much was being published, but that the systems and structures available to manage and organize published information had been taxed "far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record". And although Bush's technical solution ("memex") may seem quaint in hindsight, his hypothesis that humankind needed access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages is as true today as it was in 1945. The passion evident in Bush's essay was driven by his firm belief that "a record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted".

Vannevar Bush would be gratified at the technical progress made since 1945 toward meeting his challenge. The path of this progress would be even more amazing to Bush when one considers the technical climate in which he articulated his vision. In 1945 the highest state of the art Bush could imagine for his memex was to combine micro-photography with ENIAC, a 30-ton electronic numerical integrator and computer which required almost 200 kilowatts of electricity to operate its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Indeed, to be a futurist in Bush's day was to opine that "computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5 tons".

Sixty years later, Bush's description of a fast, responsive, easy-to-use desktop system for information searching, retrieval, and management sounds a lot like the worldwide web, Internet, and networked personal computing environment we now take for granted. Quite fittingly, academic year 2005 was also the year Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf received the Turing Prize for their work in the 1970s that now forms the basis of the nearly ubiquitous Internet. So if it took 30 years to get from memex to machine networking protocols, and another 30 years to get from TCP/IP to today's functional networked environment, will the next 30 years deliver the ubiquitous, shareable knowledge network of research results about which Bush could only dream?

Ironically, the answer may well be "no". While the technical ability to organize and access knowledge is well on the way to being satisfied, the researcher's legal ability to freely consult, store, and manipulate and share the record of science has been all but lost. Over the past 60 years, scientists themselves have voluntarily and systematically surrendered the ownership of their own research results to third-party publishers as a condition of publication. In the years between 1945 and 2005 the vast majority of scientific and technical papers have been swept into the private control of publishers, and are available only to those who can both afford the high cost of access and are willing to agree to publishers' terms of use.

During these same years, changes to intellectual property laws have steadily tightened publishers' control over the record of advances in science. While generations of Bush's academic colleagues worked to develop a technical environment that would enable the sharing, capture, and recording of knowledge, that very knowledge, once freely shared in an academic gift economy, was in the process of becoming the property of others. And as those publishers - commercial and non-commercial alike - gained ownership of the record of knowledge, they worked equally hard to bring that knowledge under tighter, more profitable, and more restrictive control.

In arguing for a robust, open system of knowledge management, Vannevar Bush points to the example of Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics, which famously was lost to the world for a generation because the paper in which it was described did not reach those who were capable of understanding and extending the concept. Today Mendel's modern counterpart might meet the same fate - but for other reasons. Those who are capable of understanding new knowledge might not have the financial resources needed to access it. Vannevar Bush could hardly have imagined a situation in which access to the record of research advances was priced not at what those who contribute the editorial content might find reasonable, or even at what the market will bear, but at a level that causes scientists and society to be excluded from access, and the market to steadily shrink.

Even more disconcerting to Vannevar Bush would be the license agreements that publishers expect academic libraries to sign. Publishers routinely attempt to restrict access to their licensed resources to a community of readers that the publishers - not scientists, faculty, libraries, or universities - have the right to define. In Bush's world the role of science was to provide swift communication between individuals, to improve the health and welfare of humankind, and to provide a record of ideas that enable humankind to share information and advance knowledge beyond the ability and lifespan of the individual. In today's world, it is publishers who expect to control who has access to information, whether within a scientific and academic community or within society as a whole.

As the magnitude of these problems, and the related risk to the openness required for education and research became clearer, a number of actions were initiated in AY05 to begin to shape an institutional response. Provost Robert Brown sponsored discussions with senior faculty and deans to assess faculty interest in and ideas for developing an institutional action strategy. Alice Gast, Associate Provost and Vice President for Research, held discussions of the issue within the framework of the Committee on Intellectual Property. David Thorburn sponsored enlightening seminars under the auspices of his MIT Communications Forum. Deposits to MIT's own open access repository DSpace, such as CSAIL technical reports, continued to rise. The MIT Press experimented with open access publishing models. The Faculty Committee on the Library System, working together with MIT Libraries Collections Services directorate, developed an informational web site. MIT expressed its support for the National Institutes of Health policies in furtherance of public access to publicly-funded research results. Director of Libraries agreed to serve as a member of the NIH Public Access Advisory Working Group. The OpenCourseWare project documented for the US Copyright Office the frustrations of working within a copyright law that prevents the use of copyrighted works for 90+ years, even when the copyright owner can no longer be identified or located. And the MIT Libraries Digital Research Group continued to improve our understanding of the remaining technical problems and work to develop solutions to the challenge of digital archiving.

To be sure these are small steps, but we think Vannevar Bush would approve. We also think he would approve of the exceptional progress made by the MIT Libraries in planning for the future and in delivering on our mission in the present. The MIT Libraries may not have owned machines holding 19,000 vacuum tubes in AY05, but they most certainly did have a dynamic research program, innovative service strategies, and a vision and service model that won them praise from the MIT Libraries Visiting Committee, faculty, and students alike.

The attached annual reports from individual directorates speak eloquently to the progress and accomplishments of the individuals and units within the MIT Libraries in AY05. In addition to the advances identified in these reports, the Libraries were fortunate to add strength and depth to the Development Office in the person of Sharon Stanczak, whom we recruited from the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., to fill the position of Development Officer.  

In AY05 the MIT Libraries achieved a standard of excellence which won them highest satisfaction ratings from faculty and students alike. This recognition was well deserved and fairly won. The MIT Libraries are a reflection of the talent, commitment and energy of the staff, and their accomplishments come from a deeply shared commitment to providing the best possible service to MIT's extraordinary community of faculty, students and staff. It continues to be a privilege to serve with such an exceptional group.

•  Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly , July 1945. www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/194507/bush

•  Van Orsdel, Lee and Born, Kathleen. "Choosing Sides: Periodical Price Survey 2005."
Library Journal , April 15, 2005. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA516819.html

•  Hamilton, Andrew. "Brains that Click." Popular Mechanics, March 1949, p. 162+

Ann J. Wolpert
Director of Libraries

More information about the MIT Libraries can be found on the World Wide Web at http://libraries.mit.edu/