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Mellon Foundation Grant for Digital Repository Economic Model Awarded to MIT Libraries

Ruth K. Seidman
Communications Coordinator, MIT Libraries
rks@mit.edu, 617-253-5686
September 13, 2000

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has donated $215,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop an economic model to maintain digital documents within an academic research library.

In partnership with the Hewlett Packard Company, the MIT Libraries are currently creating a digital repository named DSpace. Intended to be a working digital depository, DSpace will collect and maintain the digital intellectual output of the Institute’s faculty and research staff. The Mellon Foundation grant to the MIT Libraries will increase understanding of the elements necessary to an economic model that can sustain DSpace beyond its time as a research project.

Ann J. Wolpert, Director of Libraries at MIT, said: "Digital sustainability is the next great challenge for research libraries. It is essential that we gain a better understanding of the economics of maintaining an academic digital repository. Developing a ‘business’ model for DSpace will make the digital environment sustainable over time, and will serve to inform the digital initiatives at other research libraries."

DSpace is designed to be a sustainable, scalable digital repository capable of holding the approximately 10,000 articles produced by MIT authors annually, including a large amount of multimedia content. The repository will include services not usually provided by the Web, such as access control, rights management, and flexible publishing capabilities. More information about DSpace can be found at http://web.mit.edu/dspace/.