MIT Libraries
Annual Report FY 2006-2007

Technology Operations

The Libraries technical infrastructure and production systems operation is managed by the Systems and Technology Services department. They are responsible for managing the computing equipment, systems and services that support the work of the Libraries’ staff and users. Their mission is to provide an excellent and stable production environment, and to plan and implement improvements that provide benefits for the immediate future.

One of the year’s highlights was the move into full production of the Libraries’ new digital library system: DOME. The flagship collection was the Rotch Visual Collections’ digital images, which interoperates with the Institute’s course management system, Stellar, using a new Stellar Images Tool. DOME is envisioned as the future home of other digital collections of the MIT Libraries including a group of images from the Vail Collection, a project which has been funded by the generosity of a donor; planning for this project is now underway.

The year saw a growing concern with the experience of users who interact with our networked, electronic collections and services. The reconstituting of the Web Advisory Group as the User Interface Group acknowledges the need to coordinate all of our interfaces into a cohesive, well-planned whole. Project SimpLR seeks to improve users’ experience, offering a more rational and less fragmented way to discover our increasingly distributed and fragmented collections. New software and services such as MetaLib (for distributed network searching) and WorldCat Local (for aggregated searching from a hosted service) are likely to be important features of an improved discovery environment, and much time over the past year was spent in planning for the deployment of these tools and services to the MIT community.

Vera, our electronic resource management tool, reached a point of great instability this past year and is in urgent need of a hardware and software upgrade. We spent considerable effort in FY2007 continuing to test a new commercial electronic resource management system -- Ex Libris’ Verde – as a replacement to Vera but have not yet completed the migration to that product.

Major Accomplishments in FY2007

A report on Project SimpLR, a significant effort of the past year to identify ways of improving the information resource discovery environment for our users, including but also reaching beyond replacing the Vera system interface. The report resulted in a major project to replace the Vera (ERM) public user interface with a new, custom system that combines commercial software from Ex Libris (MetaLib and X-Server) with local software to support searching e-resources by the MIT community.
A report from the Metadata Aggregator Task Force, another project that evaluated available technologies to aggregate local resources in a single system with faceted browsing support. This led to a short-term plan to evaluate the new WorldCat Local service from OCLC, which has the potential to be an aggregator of various resources with a faceted browse interface.
Implementation of RSS feeds for new materials cataloged in the Libraries’ online Barton catalog.
Implementation of a new betas page on the Libraries’ website to offer experimental new services such as the RSS feeds mentioned above.
Implementation of new web sites for potential donors to the MIT Libraries, and for the new Scholarly Publishing and Licensing program of the Libraries. These also support distributed content management to enable easier maintenance by site owners.
A major overhaul of the Libraries’ staff website including new hardware, a redesigned website, and improved procedures for maintenance.
Began implementation of the Archivists’ Toolkit for the MIT Archives, a new, open-source software system for record creation and collection management by archives.
Began implementation of DOME, the Libraries' new digital library system. The system initially contains visual images from the Rotch Library, and interoperates with Stellar (MIT’s course management system) with a new Stellar Images Tool that was developed for this purpose. There are now over 12,000 images cataloged and digitized for use in by faculty for course lectures.
Significant development of DSpace@MIT to support new communities and collections of faculty research material, including OpenCourseWare’s archived course websites. Improvements to the DSpace hardware and operating support environment, and improvements to end-user support procedures via MIT’s standard bug tracking software.
Completed a significant upgrade to Ex Libris’ Aleph system (the Barton catalog) to version 18. The upgrade provided improved backend functions such as the NCIP server (needed to support consortial interlibrary borrowing programs), major corrections to authority records for cataloging, and interoperability features such as MARCXML export.
Major work on the Libraries’ computer server room in building 14, including network and cooling system upgrades, improved cable management and system labeling procedures, and new hardware for various systems.
Significant transition work to move UNIX services, software products, and data to virtualized consolidated servers and solutions in numerous areas, rebuild the Windows domain server, and upgrades to a number of FileMaker database applications to improve reliability and backup.

Other Initiatives

The lengthy process of reorganizing the Libraries’ desktop support group was completed in FY2007. The desktop technology consultants now specialize in particular areas, with a Windows Domain Manager concentrating on the server support and a Support Manager overseeing the work of the desktop support staff. Desktop support staff continue to be physically distributed across the Libraries, and are working towards improved coverage as a coherent team.
Two of our important technology-centered committees redefined their charges and membership this year to better reflect communication needs around our IT operations. The Web Advisory Group has become a User Interface Group responsible for overseeing user interfaces for all of our public-facing tools. This reflects our commitment to user-centered design, and acknowledges user experience as a guiding principle in organizing and presenting our services. The Technology Advisory Group has provided a forum for communicating local technology-related needs and concerns to the IT staff.
Finally, two of the Libraries’ senior IT staff received recognition for significant contribution to MIT. Christine Moulen received an MIT Excellence Award in the category of Innovative Solutions, and Rich Wenger received two Infinite Mile Awards in the category of Community and Collaboration. These awards reflect the high quality of the Libraries’ IT experts, as well as our commitment to recognize exceptional achievement.

Technology Research and Development

During FY2007 the Digital Library Research Group concluded two long-standing projects: CWSpace and DSpace@Cambridge.

CWSpace was a research project funded by the Microsoft iCampus program for innovations in e-learning, and the Libraries worked on a way to archive the amazing collection of openly accessible teaching material that the OpenCourseWare project has compiled. As a result of the project, DSpace@MIT is now regularly archiving older OCW course websites (four hundred to date, and more each semester) and making these available to students and teachers worldwide. It is already one of the most popular collections in DSpace@MIT, and is adding value both to the Libraries’ digital archives and to the OpenCourseWare project.

DSpace@Cambridge was a three-plus year project funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute to develop the DSpace platform for use beyond MIT, and in particular by the Cambridge University Library. This very successful collaboration led to a full production implementation of DSpace at CUL with funding for five years, many new features in the software that we discovered were needed along the way, and ultimately many more adopters of the platform in the UK and Europe that has been very valuable to the DSpace community overall. One particularly interesting outcome was the emergence of a new, commercial Institutional Repository hosting service from BioMed Central that is based in the UK. Given CMI’s mission to promote entrepreneurial activities in the UK that are driven by university research, this is a testament to the value of such partnerships.

Ongoing Research

The Libraries are also conducting two ongoing projects of note: PLEDGE and SIMILE.

The PLEDGE project is an ongoing collaboration between the MIT Libraries and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) with funding from the National Archives and Records Administration and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project is investigating how policies affect digital research archives at every level, and how those policies should be captured, encoded, enforced, and shared across preservation environments. To do this we are integrating a number of systems including DSpace, Storage Research Broker (SRB) and iRODS (a new rules-based preservation system from SDSC), and the Harvard DataVerse archive for statistical datasets. By using MIT and its existing policies as an exemplar, we can test a range of archival activities and how to automate and audit them at large-scale in a distributed, networked environment.

SIMILE is the MIT Libraries' most advanced and ambitious research project. It is a collaboration of the Libraries with Professor David Karger from CSAIL and Eric Miller from the W3C (now at Zepheira), and has been ongoing for five years, first with funding from HP Labs and now funded by the Mellon Foundation. This project is leveraging Semantic Web technology (particularly Resource Description Framework [RDF]) to improve the Libraries’ ability to support rich metadata in new digital search and display systems, and to improve interoperability across a wide range of collections and data types that was formerly prohibitively expensive. SIMILE has attracted a great deal of attention internationally, and our open-source software tools are in use in a wide variety of Web sites ranging from the Encyclopedia Britannica to the American Museum of Natural History. We now have a high-quality and mature set of tools that we can begin to exploit in the Libraries to build new services for the MIT community in scalable, economical ways.

FAÇADE

Perhaps the most exciting event in FY2007 on the research front was the funding by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) of the FACADE Project: Future-proofing Architectural Computer-Aided DEsign. This is a project to work with the School of Architecture, and Professor William Mitchell in particular, on the challenges and opportunities of collecting and preserving digital computer-aided design (CAD) models and related material for important architecture of the twenty-first century. Our flagship project is the MIT Stata Center, which was designed by Frank O. Gehry using a state-of-the-art 3D CAD system called CATIA. The records of that building include 3D CAD models, 2D CAD drawings, and myriad digital files related to the project from its initial design to its final reality. For architects and architectural historians of the future, having access to archives of this type will, of course, be critical, and no other research library anywhere is tackling this problem.

An aspect of FACADE that makes it especially valuable is that our findings in relation to architectural 3D CAD models will be applicable to a wide range of other 3D material, including CAD models from other fields of research, and 3D visualizations from almost every discipline. We now see that there is enormous need for an archiving strategy for 3D material, so we are delighted to have a project that begins to work on the problem together with MIT faculty and students who are in the thick of creating these new digital productions.

Strategic Initiatives

The MIT Libraries are involved in several strategic IT initiatives that we believe will affect our business in the future and deserve our attention today.

The DSpace™ Open-source Software Platform

DSpace continues to be the premier open-source platform for building institutional digital research archives worldwide. It is currently in use by two hundred and fifty research-producing organizations (primarily research universities and libraries), and they collectively contain more than a million items of research material, almost all openly-accessible to the public. This pattern of growth has not diminished over the past year despite the software being nearly five years old – a lifetime for software these days – and that is a testament to the ability of open-source software to improve rapidly and innovate continuously. Many hands make light work.

FY2007 saw a major turning point for DSpace: the completion of a new architectural design for the next generation of the platform, and the launch of the DSpace Foundation as an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit company to govern the growing DSpace community of users. These were both recommendations of a high-level advisory group convened in 2006, and both have now been successfully implemented. MIT and HP have hired a new Executive Director for the DSpace Foundation, Michele Kimpton, formerly an Executive Director at the Internet Archive, who has deep experience running non-profit companies and with the enormous challenges of digital preservation. We have created the non-profit company, which will be based at MIT initially, and are working with the Foundation on the implementation of the new architecture in the coming year.

Achieving this milestone in the life of the DSpace platform has been the work of many individuals over many years, so it is difficult to credit those who have been particularly instrumental, but we cannot fail to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of purpose that Julie Harford Walker, the DSpace Business Strategist, brought the project before her departure last September. Deciding what to do and how to do it has been very challenging as the story has evolved, and Julie was a key figure in guiding us to this point.

Discovery to Delivery

In FY2007 OCLC launched a service of great interest: WorldCat Local. This service allows libraries that use OCLC to provide a customized “view” of the impressive WorldCat database of library holdings to their local patrons. The localized view provides state-of-the-art user interface features for search, browse and navigating complex bibliographic content, as well as a much richer collection than any single library can maintain, while still providing local branding and giving priority to local material. Even before the launch of the new service, the MIT Libraries were in discussions with OCLC staff about how we could participate and we are actively evaluating the service now, with plans for a pilot test of it in FY2008. While the new service would not contain everything the Libraries wish to make available to our users, and there is still need to research next-generation user interfaces and search tools, we feel this is a promising way in which to move our users to search more effectively at the “network level” without sacrificing our ability to promote our collections to them.

Enhanced Publishing

An interesting new theme in scholarly communication is the emergence of “enhanced publishing” which leverages digital scholarship to build more complex and sophisticated products from digital sources, for example: the ability to interweave published articles in digital formats with the research data that they describe so that the reader can move seamlessly between text and data; or mining digital articles for keywords that can be used to generate taxonomic data from the source text – i.e., generating new research data from narrative descriptions of completed research. These innovations are largely the result of this digital material being openly accessible for reuse by scholars, and are, in turn, generating more digital scholarship for libraries to acquire and manage. The MIT Libraries, with the DSpace@MIT digital research archive and our collaborations with the Science Commons, W3C, and other groups working on scientific informatics, are able to experiment with these new forms of publication and engage researchers in thinking about how libraries can serve this new form of publishing.

Cyberinfrastructure

The specter of a national “cyberinfrastructure” for digital research continues to grow in scope and complexity. In FY2007 reports on Cyberinfrastructure needs for the humanities and social sciences joined those of the science and engineering communities to form a larger picture of what is needed. The Cyberinfrastructure includes technology, of course – networks, hardware, software and standards to make it all work together – but it also includes new business and governance challenges, including many questions of roles and responsibilities as we migrate relentlessly towards the digital. Libraries are taking shape as part of this new infrastructure, but this is a critical point in time for the library community to define its role before events overtake us. MIT has been very involved in these discussions in both national and international forums, and we have invested serious effort this past year to insure that we remain engaged in the evolving story.

Conclusion

Every year we imagine that the achievements of the past year were greater and more impressive than any previous year, and that we could not possibly achieve such grandeur again… but of course we do. The MIT Libraries are strategic in their approach to the major issues and challenges facing libraries and their institutions today, so that we can make the right choices at the right moments and continue. MIT has a culture of embracing change with enthusiasm and glee – even demanding change where others would urge caution, and its Libraries are no different. But wanting change and managing change successfully are different, and we tread carefully to make sure that the MIT Libraries of the future can be as successful as ever, and as much the heart of the campus as ever. To do this we will continue to pay attention to our environment, take risks, experiment, assess results, and adapt where appropriate. No doubt next year will be even more impressive.

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology

webmaster@libraries.mit.edu
This page was last updated on 11/20/07

MIT Libraries Annual Report FY 2006-2007