The session will be held on Tuesday October 22, from 3-4:30 in E25-111.

Speakers will include:

Jacqueline Thai

Jacqueline Thai, of the new open access journal PeerJ
Thai is Head of Publishing Operations at PeerJ, an open access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal in the Biological and Medical Sciences. It offers a unique business model: low-cost lifetime memberships that allow authors (if their papers are accepted) to publish once, twice, or unlimited times per year, depending on the membership level.

Tibor Tscheke

Tibor Tscheke, of the soon-to-be-launched publishing platform scienceOpen.com
Tscheke is CFO and CTO of ScienceOpen.com, an open access publishing platform to support researchers in networking, accessing, organizing, and publishing their work. Founded by individuals with decades of experience in traditional scholarly publishing, ScienceOpen’s aim is to “combine the goal of open science with social networking and crowd sourcing tools to create knowledge out of a sea of information.”

Marguerite Avery, of MIT Press and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Avery is Senior Acquisitions Editor at The MIT Press. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, Avery is focused on seeking out solutions for scholarly publishing to accommodate the changing needs of scholars, including publishing models for open access.

Marguerite Avery

This panel is being presented in celebration of International Open Access Week, and is intended to provide a forum for discussion of new open access models of scholarly publishing and how they can serve authors and readers. We anticipate a lively and informative conversation.

Refreshments will be served.

If you have questions about this event, contact Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries

Nate Nickerson, MIT News Office:

Ann Wolpert, MIT’s director of libraries since 1996, has died after a brief illness. She was 70 years old.

Wolpert was a pioneer in digital stewardship, bringing to the MIT community a deep understanding of scholarship, of research, and of the library’s broader mission to preserve and disseminate knowledge. Under her leadership, the MIT Libraries developed DSpace, a milestone in digital libraries that catalyzed the institutional repository movement.

Wolpert began work at MIT just as the Internet was emerging, and her tenure was marked by her passionate response to the opportunity and upheaval that resulted for research libraries. In scientific, research, and university communities around the world, a debate, still unresolved, came to the fore: how the decades-old system of peer-reviewed scholarly journals ought to operate in the digital world.

Wolpert became a leading voice in that discussion; she argued for unrestricted online access to journal articles. In a February 2013 essay in the New England Journal of Medicine, she not only made the case for such access: She also called it an inevitability. “There is no doubt,” she wrote, “that the public interests vested in funding agencies, universities, libraries, and authors, together with the power and reach of the Internet, have created a compelling and necessary momentum for open access. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be inexpensive, but it is only a matter of time.”

Though Wolpert made her case forcefully, she was not dismissive of concerns about how open access might work in practice, and she upheld the value of peer review. “The fact,” she wrote, “that faculty members and researchers donate to publishers the ownership of their research articles — as well as their time and effort as reviewers — does not mean that there are no expenses associated with the production of high-quality publications. For all its known flaws, no one wants to destroy peer-reviewed publication.”

Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, remembers Wolpert as “one of the great intellectual leaders at MIT.” She fused, he says, a mix of business experience from her earlier career with serious academic curiosity and integrity. “Ann was funny, warm, caring, and remarkably fair,” Abelson says.

“She believed in open access, but it went deeper than that,” he adds. “Her central insight was that in the age of the Internet, a great research library could serve not only as a window into scholarly output for given members of university and research communities, but also as a window for the world at large into the scholarly enterprise. That was a great and thrilling idea, and she pursued it deftly and with great respect for the full spectrum of faculty views.”

MIT President L. Rafael Reif, in his previous role as provost, worked closely with Wolpert. “I knew her to be very dedicated to MIT, and she thought carefully about how our library system could best serve the Institute and beyond,” he says. “She was an excellent steward of our scholarship — and a very dear colleague. I will miss her very much.”

As director of libraries, Wolpert managed the MIT Libraries and the MIT Press. The MIT Libraries — with five major subject collections, the Institute Archives and Special Collections, and a staff of 170 — support the research and teaching needs of the Institute community. The MIT Press publishes around 30 journals and 220 books each year in a wide range of subjects.

Wolpert also served on MIT’s Committee on Intellectual Property, the Council on Educational Technology, the OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee, the Deans’ Group, and Academic Council. She also served as chair of the board of directors of MIT Technology Review.

In 2000, Wolpert helped lead the MIT Libraries’ collaboration with Hewlett-Packard to build DSpace, an open-source digital archive for faculty output that has been adopted by more than 1,000 institutions worldwide.

In 2009, Wolpert was instrumental in the conception and passage of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, whereby faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace@MIT. It was the first institution-wide policy of its kind in the United States. Open sharing of MIT scholarship has given readers around the world access to the results of MIT’s research.

Wolpert continued to be a player in other “startups” that have the potential to transform the way research institutions and their libraries collaborate to solve problems big enough to call for a collective response. She referred to these as “solutions at scale.” Among them is the Digital Preservation Network (DPN), to whose inaugural board she was recently appointed. DPN was created to ensure that the scholarly record is preserved for future generations by using a shared, national preservation ecosystem composed of several federated, replicating nodes containing redundant copies of all deposits to protect against catastrophic loss.

Wolpert was a leader in her field. “Ann has been a trailblazer in defining the new roles of libraries in an era of data-intensive scholarship,” says Cliff Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information. “Her work in the development of institutional repositories as a means of curating and making public the research contributions of universities has fundamentally reshaped strategies for managing scholarship at a national and international level. She will be greatly missed.”

Prior to joining MIT, Wolpert was executive director of library and information services at the Harvard Business School. Her experience previous to Harvard included management of the information center of Arthur D. Little, Inc., an international management and consulting firm, where she also worked on various consulting assignments. More recent consulting assignments took her to the University of New Mexico, Cornell University and Adelphi University in New York, the campuses of INCAE in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, MASDAR in Abu Dhabi, the League of European Research Libraries in Amsterdam, the National Library of China, and the Malaysia University of Science and Technology.

In 2005 Wolpert served as president of the Association of Research Libraries and was most recently a member of its Influencing Public Policies Steering Committee. She served on the boards of directors of the Boston Library Consortium, the National Academies’ Board of Research Data and Information (BRDI), DuraSpace, and DPN. She also served as a publications advisor to the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Wolpert received a BA from Boston University and an MLS from Simmons College, where she was an honorary trustee and a member of the board of advisors of the PhD Program in Managerial Leadership in the Information Professions at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Wolpert is survived by her husband, Samuel A. Otis Jr., and a large extended family.

The MIT News article will be updated to include information about memorial services for Wolpert as that information becomes available.

Justin Casinghino

Stories in Wind: Justin Casinghino will talk about his compositions for wind quintet, including One Hen, which was recently featured on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2013 Tanglewood Family Concert.

Date: Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Place: Lewis Music Library, Bldg. 14E-109
Time: 5-6 pm
Reception follows
Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by MIT Music and Theater Arts.

Prefer to learn in a classroom?

Register for one of our October workshops on a variety of topics, including productivity tools.

Like to learn on your own?

Check out research guides on over 100 topics, from Aeronautics to Zotero. These guides will tell you the best resources for your subject, whatever it is.

MIT Libraries support many productivity tools that can save you time and effort. Learn about productivity tools, including:

• Mobile tools & apps
• Citation & content management tools to organize your references & PDFs
• LibX: web browser add-on for easy access from off- & on-campus
• RSS feeds & research alerts

Have questions or suggestions about productivity tools? Ask us! Tell Us!

Look in the August 1933 issue of the National Geographic Archive from 1884-1994.

Show your MIT ID card at the desk to get the logon and password.
The Lewis Music Library is located in Bldg. 14E-109 and library hours are on the web.

Photo: L. Barry Hetherington

Access to the Barker 24/7 study space will resume at 9:00pm and the library will be open for regular business hours on Saturday.

All other MIT Libraries locations will remain open for regular business hours and the 24/7 study spaces in Dewey and Hayden will be available after closing.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

photo by L.Barry Hetherington

Managing your references: Overview of EndNote, Zotero, & Mendeley – Register
Thu October 3, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, 14N-132
Contact: Remlee Green, remlee@mit.edu

Using citation management software to create and maintain a collection of references or PDFs is becoming more common and important in today’s academic world. These software packages (EndNote, Zotero, & Mendeley) allow users to search databases, retrieve relevant citations, and build a bibliography to be added to a paper or thesis or stored for future reference. We’ll take a look at these 3 tools.

Please register for this session.

Intro to R – Register
Thu October 3, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, 1-115
Contact: Jennie Murack, murack@mit.edu

Get an introduction to R, the open-source system for statistical computation and graphics. With hands-on exercises, learn how to import and manage datasets, create R objects, install and load R packages, conduct basic statistical analyses, and create common graphical displays.

Prerequisite: This workshop is appropriate for those with little or no prior experience with R. MIT only – Athena login required.

Please register for this session.

Introduction to GIS for Architecture – Register
Fri October 4, 1:00 – 3:00 pm, 14N-132
Contact: Jennie Murack, murack@mit.edu

GIS is for architects too! Learn how to complete simple tasks using ArcMap GIS software, including making a basic map and exporting to CAD. This workshop is geared toward architecture students or those looking to learn how GIS can be used for architecture-related tasks.

Please register for this session.

Patent Searching Fundamentals
Thu Oct 10, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, 14N-132 - Register
Thu Oct 24, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, 14N-132 – Register
Contact: Howard Silver, hsilver@mit.edu

While you won’t come out of this session qualified to be a patent attorney, you will be able to successfully find patent references from all over the world and know how to obtain patent text and diagrams. The session will be a hands-on practicum that will help de-mystify the patent literature and expose attendees to key resources for finding patents through free resources available on the web.

Please register for either the 10/10 or 10/24 session.

Intro to GIS – Register
Mon October 7, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, 14N-132
Contact: Jennie Murack, murack@mit.edu

Learn the basics of visualizing and analyzing geographic information and creating your own maps in a Geographic Information System (GIS). We will introduce open source and proprietary GIS software options and let attendees choose to work through exercises using ESRI ArcGIS (proprietary) and/or Quantum GIS (QGIS) (open source). Learn to work with data from the MIT Geodata Repository, analyze the data, and create maps that can be used in reports and presentations.

Please register for this session.

R Programming – Register
Thu October 10, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, 1-115
Contact: Jennie Murack, murack@mit.edu

This intermediate R course will guide users through a variety of programming functions. This workshop covers blocks, loops, program flow, functions, S3 classes and methods, and debugging in R. This workshop is intended for those already comfortable with using R for data analysis who wish to move on to writing their own functions.

Prerequisite: A basic familiarity with R, such as acquired from an introductory R workshop. MIT only – Athena login required.

Please register for this session.

To Infinity and Beyond: Borrowing from a Galaxy of Libraries
Fri October 18, 2:00 – 3:00 pm, 14N-132
Contact: Pat Page, pagep@mit.edu

Did you know you can access a universe of resources? Don’t let your research end with MIT’s holdings—this workshop will show you three trajectories to borrowing from non-MIT collections. We’ll explore the different benefits of these trajectories, so you can take your research to infinity—and beyond!

Endnote Basics – Register
Fri Oct 25, 12:00 – 1:00 pm, 14N-132
Contact: Anita Perkins, perkins@mit.edu

EndNote is a “personal bibliographic software” package which allows you to create and manage a database of bibliographic references. Learn how to find and use information more effectively in our hands-on workshop.

Please register for this session.

Course Reserves at the MIT Libraries
Wed October 30, 1:00 – 2:00 pm, 14N-132
Contact: Molly McInerney, mcinerne@mit.edu

Are you a new instructor or teaching assistant at MIT, or are you an administrative assistant who supports teaching faculty? Do you want to learn more about course reserves and their copyright policies?

The MIT Libraries can help you navigate reserves services for print and electronic materials, and we will provide an overview of fair use and copyright guidelines for course reserves. We will also cover the details about submitting required textbook information via the Semester Book Submission Form.

Mergent Intellect, a database providing basic company facts on over 20 million North American companies and over 70 million global companies, is now available through MIT Libraries. Mergent Intellect provides essentially the information as Hoovers Online using data from Hoovers and Dun and Bradstreet but with additional downloading capabilities not available through Hoovers Online. Hoovers Online will be no longer be available at MIT after November 2013.

Key features of Mergent Intellect include:

• location, estimated sales and number of employees, industries, and other basic data on companies
• exporting of up to 2,000 company records per download
• Dun & Bradstreet data including D-U-N-S identifier numbers and corporate “family tree” details
• executive contacts and biographies

For more sources of company information, visit the MIT Libraries’ Companies research guide.

Steven Dubowsky

A team of MIT researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Steven Dubowsky, are developing a solar-powered system that can produce 1,000 liters of clean drinking water a day—a potential boon in areas where fresh water is scarce and expensive. Over the past several months, the researchers have traveled to remote areas in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula to test the purification system, which includes several photovoltaic panels, a tank, pumps, filters, and computers. Communities there can be a day’s drive from drinkable water. “There may be 25 million indigenous people in Mexico alone,” Dubowsky says. “This is not a small problem. The potential for a system like this is huge.” The researchers may do similar tests of the system in other countries.

Explore Professor Dubowsky’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

During this outage, you will not be able to:

• Place new Interlibrary Borrowing requests
• Place requests for article delivery from the Library Storage Annex
• Download PDF copies of articles
• Track or change existing requests
• Renew Interlibrary Borrowing books
• Do anything that requires ILLiad

For more information, see our ILLiad system outage page.  If you have any questions, Ask Us!

This fall, the fund began supporting memberships in a new and innovative open access journal in the biological and medical sciences, PeerJ. PeerJ is peer-reviewed scholarly journal which emphasizes rapid publication, and focuses on determining “scientific and methodological soundness” rather than on “subjective determinations of ‘impact,’ ‘novelty’ or ‘interest.’”

Its funding model is unique: PeerJ has a lifetime membership model. Once an author is a member, the author can publish for free, at a frequency based on the level of membership:

Basic (which allows a Member to publish once per year, for life); Enhanced (which allows a Member to publish twice per year, for life); and Investigator (which allows a Member to publish an unlimited number of articles per year, for life).

The Libraries’ open access fund will support PeerJ memberships at the Basic or Enhanced level. To apply, please provide details about your article through the open access fund application form.

More information:

• Information about PeerJ
• FAQ on the purpose, scope, and use of the fund
• MIT Libraries’ support for open access publishing

If you have any questions about eligibility for or use of the fund, please contact Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries.

What can be better than learning how to use valuable research tools while competing for prizes?

Discover how to take the challenge.

Last year’s winner was MIT’s very own Patrick Heider, a graduate student in Chemical Engineering.

So let the games begin and good luck!

Cabot, Chemistry, Fine Arts, Harvard-Yenching, Loeb Music, Physics, Tozzer and Widener.

MIT has similar agreements for Faculty, Graduate Students and Research Staff at Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine  and the Graduate School of Design (GSD) Loeb Library. You may apply for access and borrowing privileges using the Countway or Loeb online application.

Do you need to renew your privileges? The special borrower card expires on May 31^st for students and August 31^st for Faculty and Research Staff. Submit an online application to receive your new privilege letter and then visit the Widener Library Privileges Desk to renew your borrowing privileges for the year.

Pauline Maier

Historian Pauline Maier, who wrote award-winning books on 18^th-century America, died last month at age 75. Maier had been on the MIT faculty since 1978. In one of her best-known books, American Scripture, she helped show that the Declaration of Independence was a “secular document” and a collaborative effort, not a sacred text that Thomas Jefferson wrote on his own: In her research Maier found dozens of local resolutions to declare independence from the British Crown. The New York Times named American Scripture one of the 11 best books of 1997.

“One of the key intellectual figures in her field, Pauline was also a leader at MIT—a great historian and scholar who understood the pulse of the Institute and helped guide and improve our community in profound ways,” said Deborah Fitzgerald, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT.

“The impact of losing Pauline goes beyond family, friends, and colleagues. It extends to the young students who now will never encounter her enthusiasm, the cut of her mind, and how she made America’s past come alive,” wrote Maier’s MIT colleague John Dower in a post alongside other remembrances and tributes.

Maier was on the original faculty committee that put forward the MIT faculty Open Access Policy.

Explore Professor Maier’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

New Resources

• New search tool  Finding library resources just got easier with BartonPlus. It brings together many library collections in one search interface–searching most MIT-licensed e-resources like e-books and full-text articles, as well as collections in the classic Barton catalog like books, theses, music, DVDs, and more. 

• More options for borrowing  Borrow Direct, a partnership that allows library materials to be shared between member institutions, has expanded to include the University of Chicago. MIT users can search over 50 million volumes owned by Borrow Direct libraries through MIT’s WorldCat.

• New guide to APIs for scholarly resources  Many scholarly publishers, databases, and products offer APIs to allow users with programming skills to more powerfully extract data to serve a variety of research purposes. With an API, users might create programmatic searches of a citation database, extract statistical data, or dynamically query and post blog content. Learn more in the APIs for Scholarly Resources guide.

• Music Oral History Project  For over 100 years music has been a vibrant part of MIT’s culture. A new website features in-depth interviews with faculty, staff, and former students about their musical experiences at the Institute, as well as their professional careers in music or other fields.

• New e-resources  Find a number of new online resources including: the National Geographic Archive, Smithsonian Global Sound, several new titles in the Gale Virtual Reference Library, the Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, and Encyclopedia of Hydrological Sciences in the Wiley Online Library, and more.

Improved study spaces

• Upgrades to Hayden Library  The window bays in Hayden have gotten a facelift! The windows have been cleaned, frames painted, and new shades have replaced the curtains. Also check out the  new artwork by Dennis Oppenheim that adorns the first floor wall. Additionally, a number of tables and study carrels in Hayden were refinished this summer. Coming up – we hope to reupholster some of the comfy seating on the 1st floor.

• Finding locations, hours, and study spaces  New and improved webpages make it easier to locate current and future library hours with a date-picker option. Also find and reserve study spaces online and learn about what each location has to offer.
  

Upcoming events

• Music & Theater Arts Composer Forums  During the fall term the Lewis Music Library will host MTA Composer Forums. Stop by the library at 5pm on Oct. 9, Oct. 23, Nov. 6, Nov. 20 to hear from featured musicians.

•  Fall workshops Throughout the month of October the Libraries will offer a series of workshops on subject-specific resources. See the event calendar for details.
  

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for all the latest news!

Barker & Dewey
Monday-Thursday: 8:30am-11pm
Friday: 8:30am-6pm
Saturday: 11am-7pm
Sunday: 11am-11pm

Hayden (Humanities & Science) & Rotch
Monday-Thursday: 8:30am-12am
Friday: 8:30am-8pm
Saturday: 11am-7pm
Sunday: 11am-12am

Lewis Music
Monday-Thursday: 9am-9pm
Friday: 9am-6pm
Saturday: 1pm-6pm
Sunday: 2pm-9pm

These hours will remain in effect until Friday, December 20, 2013. For a complete list of library locations and hours, see our hours page.

Have questions? Ask Us!

The Libraries will begin Fall semester hours on Tuesday, September 3.

Have questions? Ask Us!

We’re currently hiring for daytime and evening/weekend hours in locations across campus. You could work behind the scenes doing bibliographic searching or prepping materials for the shelf or for delivery. You could also work at the library desk or in the stacks.

Want more info? Want to apply?

Come talk to us at the Libraries’ Orientation week events

Check out the MIT Student Jobs Fair:

• What: Talk to student employers from departments across campus, and bring your ID to file your I-9 form with SFS

• When: Thursday, 8/29, 11am-1pm

• Where: Information Intersection at Stata Center (Building 32)

Learn more and apply on the Libraries’ student jobs page

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS:

Academic Expo
What: An expo of MIT’s academic departments and programs. The Libraries will be ready to answer your questions and offer information about our resources and services. Pick up handouts and goodies.
When: Tuesday, August 27, 2013, 2 – 3:30 pm
Where: Johnson Athletics Center (W34). Look for the Libraries’ banner.

Hitchhiker’s Guide Library Tours
What: A walking tour of the MIT Libraries.
When: Thursday, August 29, tours start at 2 & 2:30 pm
Where: Meet in Lobby 7; Ends outside Hayden Library for the ice cream social.

Freshmen Explorations: Ice Cream Social
What: Free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream!
When: Thursday, August 29, 3 – 5 pm
Where: Lipchitz Courtyard (Building 14); rain location: hallway in front of Hayden Library (Building 14)

GRADUATE STUDENTS:

Graduate Student Orientation: Grad School 101
What: An introduction to the MIT Libraries services and resources.
When: Monday, August 26, 10:10 am – 12:00 pm
Where: 26-100

14th Annual New Graduate Student Reception
What: A reception for new graduate students, with beverages and light refreshments provided.
NOTE: Tickets may be purchased for $5 at the Graduate Student Council Information Booth.
When: Friday, August 30, 5 – 7 pm
Where: Barker Engineering Library Dome (Building 10-500)

ALL MIT COMMUNITY:

Health & Community Fair
What: Libraries’ staff will be ready to answer your questions and offer information about our resources and services. Pick up handouts and goodies.
When: Tuesday, September 3, 1 – 4 pm
Where: Kresge Oval, outside the Student Center

Barker, Dewey, Hayden (Humanities & Science), and Rotch
Wednesday-Friday*: 9am-8pm
Saturday: 1pm-6pm
Sunday: 1pm-6pm

*Barker will close at 4pm on Friday, August 30, and Lewis Music will remain on its summer hours schedule all of next week.

All libraries will be closed on Labor Day, Monday, September 2, and Fall term hours will begin on Tuesday, September 3. For more information about hours and locations, visit our hours page.

Have questions? Ask us!

Cynthia Rudin

Crimes like burglary often go unwitnessed, which makes it difficult to predict and prevent a criminal’s future acts. Police analysts scour reports and databases for patterns in criminal activity, but the work is labor and time intensive. Two Sloan School of Management researchers, including associate professor Cynthia Rudin, have teamed up with Cambridge police crime analysts to develop an algorithm that quickly detects patterns including where, when, and how a crime happened. “You’re trying to find the [modus operandi] of the suspect,” Rudin told the Boston Globe. “If you can do this really effectively it can lead to an accurate suspect description.” The algorithm, called Series Finder, is built on data from nearly 5,000 housebreaks in Cambridge over a decade.

Explore Professor Rudin’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Hayden library group study room

The Hayden group study room (14E-311) will be closed for construction beginning Thursday, August 15, and continuing through late September.

The group study spaces in the Hayden first floor 24/7 room will remain open as usual.  You can also find other group study spaces in the Barker, Dewey and Music libraries, as well as the Information Intersection.  See our group study spaces page for details on room capacity and reservations.

Have any questions?  Ask Us!

Dr. Nancy McGovern (photo by L. Barry Hetherington)

Nancy McGovern, MIT Libraries’ Head of Curation and Preservation Services is the recipient of the Preservation Publication Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award will be presented at a ceremony during the Council of State Archivists and SAA Joint Annual Meeting in New Orleans, August 11–17, 2013.

The award recognizes her work as volume editor of Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation, and the work of Katherine Skinner (the series editor). Published by Educopia Institute in 2012, Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation provides a comprehensive synthesis of current thinking in the field of digital preservation and proposed methods of action and cooperation that “support the preservation of our collective cultural memory.” The publication, which is available freely as a PDF, contains a collection of peer-reviewed essays that were developed by conference panels and attendees of the 2011 “Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation” (ANADP) conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

• Choose interviews by MIT affiliation (MIT faculty, staff, student, etc.) and by topic (composers, jazz, world music, etc.).
• Select interviews to watch video, or listen to audio.
• Search within transcripts by keyword, download PDF transcripts, and view biographical background information on each interviewee.

The resource is a culmination of over a decade’s worth of documentation by Forrest Larson, a staff member at MIT’s Lewis Music Library. The project was generously funded by MIT alumnus Lionel Kinney (’53). Learn more about the project.

• Organize your citations
  Learn how to manage citations & PDFs, then cite your references with EndNote, Mendeley, & Zotero.
  
• Manage your personal digital files
  Organize & tag your personal digital files, so you can find them again easily.
• Organize your personal content
  Get organized & work more efficiently. Choose collaborative tools for organizing & annotating PDFs, notes, & other files.
  
• Manage your data
  Manage your data before you begin your research and throughout its life cycle to ensure that you and other researchers can use it effectively now and into the future.

The University of Chicago Library is the ninth largest research library in North America with 10.7 million volumes in print and electronic form. Chicago will become the tenth university to join the Borrow Direct partnership, which includes MIT and the libraries of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard.

The Reading Room, Mansueto Library, University of Chicago. Photo by John Schiebel

Through Borrow Direct, faculty, students, and staff from participating institutions can search over 50 million volumes in the members’ combined library catalogs, and request circulating materials directly from the library where they are held.

“The strength of the combined collections of the outstanding libraries represented in Borrow Direct [is] a tremendous asset to our community and to library users across the cooperative,” said Ann Wolpert, MIT’s Director of Libraries, when MIT joined the partnership in 2011.

Since the Borrow Direct service was implemented at MIT, MIT users have borrowed nearly 2,500 items from other institutions. The average turnaround time to receive a requested item at MIT is 3.5 days.

Learn more about how to use Borrow Direct, or go directly to MIT’s WorldCat to search for books from Borrow Direct libraries.

Jana Dambrogio

Jana Dambrogio will join the staff of the MIT Libraries in September as the new Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator. In this role she will manage MIT’s special collections conservation program–planning and executing conservation treatments for the physical maintenance of rare books, archives, and manuscripts. She will also contribute to the Libraries’ overall preservation strategy.

Dambrogio comes from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) where she has been a senior conservator since 2004. In addition to her work at NARA, she brings an impressive array of experience from consultancies, fellowships, and internships at other well-known national and international institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, the Vatican Secret Archives, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Houghton Library at Harvard University.

“Jana is an experienced and innovative conservator who is prepared to continue the high level of commitment, notable ability, and passion for conservation that we have been fortunate to have in this position,” said Nancy McGovern, MIT Libraries’ Head of Curation and Preservation Services.

The Libraries conservator position is endowed by generous long-time MIT Libraries’ supporter Thomas F. Peterson, Jr. (Class of 1957).

MIT Libraries’ Director of Research, Micah Altman, played a key role in the creation of the document, serving on the NDSA Coordinating Committee, contributing as a joint author, and formally introducing the report at the Library of Congress’s annual Digital Preservation conference. Nancy McGovern, MIT Libraries’ Head of Curation and Preservation Services, also contributed to the report, and is leading a related project on digital repository self-assessment.

The National Agenda’s purpose is to highlight emerging technological trends, identify gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and provide insight into the work needed to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible and comprehensible in the future.

“Digital stewardship is vital for the authenticity of public records, the reliability of scientific evidence, and the enduring accessibility to our cultural heritage. Knowledge of ongoing research, practice, and organizational collaborations has been distributed widely across disciplines, sectors, and communities of practice.The agenda identifies the highest-impact opportunities to advance the state of the art, the state of practice, and the state of collaboration in this rapidly changing field,” said Dr. Altman.

The 2014 Agenda integrates the perspective of dozens of experts and hundreds of institutions, convened through the Library of Congress. It outlines the challenges and opportunities related to digital preservation activities in four broad areas: Organizational Roles, Policies, and Practices; Digital Content Areas; Infrastructure Development; and Research Priorities.

Read the full report.

Many scholarly publishers, databases, and products offer APIs to allow users with programming skills to more powerfully extract data to serve a variety of research purposes.  With an API, users might create programmatic searches of a citation database, extract statistical data, or dynamically query and post blog content.

To learn more about these APIs, the MIT Libraries offer a guide to APIs for scholarly resources.  The guide lists commonly used scholarly resources at MIT that make their APIs available for use, including Nature, Web of Science, arXiv, PubMed, Scopus, and others.  If you have programming skills and would like to use APIs in your research, use the guide to begin your exploration.

For more information, please contact Mark Clemente, Library Fellow for Scholarly Publishing and Licensing, at clemente@mit.edu.