MIT Libraries
Annual Report FY 2005-2006

Director, Libraries

After several years of relative calm, popular press speculation about the future of libraries resurfaced, with enthusiasm, in AY2006. The Google digitization initiative, the Microsoft/Yahoo Open Content Alliance, various cyberinfrastructure reports, Government Printing Office plans to digitize government documents, and rising legislative interest in assuring taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded publications and research results were among the issues that fueled a new round of lively expositions and debates about the form and future of libraries.

Press speculation notwithstanding, here on the campus of MIT, students and faculty of the Institute continued to make extensive use of, and express considerable satisfaction with, the richly relevant information resources, and continuously evolving services made available to them by the MIT Libraries. In a variety of surveys of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students, the MIT Libraries continue to rank in the top tier of satisfaction among these key client groups. For this we can thank both the superb staff of the Libraries, and the willingness of the MIT community to collaborate with us as we routinely reevaluate how best to deliver on our mission.

Many wags have ended Rudyard Kipling’s poetic musing “if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs” with the sentiment “you probably don’t understand the situation”. In the case of MIT and its Libraries, however, the community’s confidence in and satisfaction with library resources and services is based on an informed understanding of the complex challenges all innovations – but especially technical innovations – face. Moreover, at MIT the fact that the Libraries have tended to focus on the emerging edge of new knowledge, and on using new technology to develop tools that support productivity for the MIT community, has particular resonance with the campus.

Representative of the Institute’s ability to keep its head about it was MIT’s response during AY2006 to the National Institutes of Health public access policy. Pursuant to a meeting with interested MIT faculty, followed by extensive discussions across the academic enterprise, the Institute developed a copyright amendment agreement that individual faculty could use to retain key rights in published, peer-reviewed articles. The goal was to enable faculty to comply, should they so choose, with NIH policy requesting the deposit of articles in PubMedCentral. MIT’s copyright amendment agreement has drawn considerable national attention as a positive step universities can take to clarify and support faculty interests whenever or wherever faculty publish their research results. It has also been a source of concern and concerted reaction on the part of some publishers, who fear the unknown consequences of its adoption.

MIT, in contrast, has never feared innovation and remains committed to the open exchange of information for the benefit of education, research, and the nation. In a slim book entitled Invention: The care and feeding of ideas, (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993), published 30 years after his death, the legendary mathematician and MIT Professor, Norbert Wiener, argues that for innovations to have an impact, at least four important elements must come together in place and time. He calls these stages 1) intellectual climate, 2) technical climate, 3) social climate, and 4) economic climate.

Wiener would have been keenly interested in the case study in innovation presented by such inventions as the World Wide Web, ubiquitous networking, industrial-scale digitization, the challenges of long-term digital storage on a previously-unimaginable scale, and the rapidly evolving needs of researchers and educators for highly integrated access to data, materials, and analyzed research results. The thesis that ideas in and of themselves are insufficient to guarantee the long-term success of an invention, has great resonance with our current environment.

Indeed, in Wiener’s view, the ultimately successful applications to which a new idea can be put are rarely obvious in the early, heady days when the right intellectual climate supports an idea’s “spawning all over the community and one [person] after another is informing himself of its potentialities”. Only after an idea has passed the additional tests of the technical climate, social climate, and economic climate (and here we must include legal and regulatory climate – an element of contemporary life with which Wiener was – lucky man – less concerned) will the invention’s true value be revealed.

The innovations that drive speculation about the form and future of research libraries are important ideas that underpin interesting and worthy efforts. They have the potential to transform research, scholarship, and education. But if Wiener’s wisdom still holds, the eventual outcome will unfold over many years; years in which they will be assessed in technical, social, and economic climates, and in years during which still more technological inventions will emerge to be tested by the requirements of the technical, social, and economic climates necessary to succeed over time.

Another key nugget of wisdom found in Inventions is the notion that all structures and systems must be able to yield to stress if they are to survive. In describing institutional responses to new ideas Wiener draws the analogy of the truss bridge. To appreciate the influence of a new invention on an existing system, he suggests, one must be able to assess the impact of that invention on the entire structure of the bridge. Welded bridges are thus designed to give, or yield, in intended places so as to restore equilibrium before the structure fails. A welded bridge of a material so rigid that it does not give perceptibly, Wiener reminds us, has often collapsed without apparent reason through the bad distribution of internal stresses. Since stress is as unavoidable in business models as it is in systems and structures, a bridge that accommodates stress by yielding appropriately will redistribute stress and restore equilibrium.

Observing the MIT Libraries over the past year was to watch a bridge that is extraordinarily capable of maintaining continuous equilibrium under steadily changing stressors. The structural elements that enable the Libraries to adapt so magnificently to strain are their exceptionally talented staff, their extraordinary commitment to the Institute and its faculty and students, and their three-fold emphasis on quality, relevance, and distinction. MIT faculty and students have been thoughtful enough to respond in kind. They let us know when we have achieved our goals and they have been generous partners and collaborators as we experiment and innovate.

In AY06, feedback from our highly successful and informative community survey has enabled us to update and redesign service elements for the community, thereby assuring on-going quality. Feedback from the survey additionally pointed toward a community interest in greater emphasis on networked and historical digital information resources. That we are doing. And MIT’s Graduate students encouraged us to create distinction for MIT and the MIT Libraries around the tools and interfaces that support ease of use of networked information, which we are also pursuing.

For its own part, the MIT Libraries pursued a sizeable number of self-initiated programs. The R2 study pointed to strategies to simplify and streamline our materials-handling processes. Rethinking reference and instructional services produced an innovative and uniquely-MIT organizational structure for Public Services. Refocusing resource development activities resulted in higher visibility and greater success for the Libraries' fund-raising priorities. Grants in support of the Libraries' research and educational priorities enabled the pursuit of exciting and productive new research directions.

It is humbling and inspiring to read the reports of the directorates and departments of the MIT Libraries. The staff of these Libraries exhibit a seemingly endless capacity and willingness to innovate, adapt, respond, improve, and reinvent the role of the research library in the 21st century. It continues to be a privilege to work with these exceptional people. And I remain grateful to the governance, faculty, students, and administration of MIT for their steadfast support of the mission of the MIT Libraries.

Ann J. Wolpert
Director of Libraries

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This page was last updated on 08/15/07

MIT Libraries Annual Report FY 2005-2006

Director, Libraries

MIT Libraries
Annual Report FY 2005-2006