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.

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!

Best explained on its website,“Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a peer reviewed, PubMed indexed journal devoted to the publication of biological, medical, chemical, and physical research in a video format…  JoVE takes advantage of video technology to capture and transmit the multiple facets and intricacies of life science research.”

The Barton record for JoVE lists the various sections available through the Libraries; these include Applied Physics, Bioengineering, Chemistry, Neuroscience, and more.

The Libraries heartily invites you to take a look at “The First Scientific Video Journal.”  Ask Us! for further details.

Explore OneMine, “an innovative collaboration among societies that serve the mining and minerals community.” Gathering documents from groups like SME, (Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration), TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society), and AIME and SAIMM (for those in the know), OneMine wants to provide materials online that previously have been in print only. We are very interested in your feedback on OneMine, so try a search on “rare earth oxide extraction”, and Tell Us what you unearth!

“We are confident that the improvements unveiled today will enhance the SciFinder user experience and enable new and faster scientific breakthroughs.”

For more information contact Erja Kajosalo, kajosalo@mit.edu, Librarian for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. She knows tips like ‘Chrome on the Mac is not usable with SciFinder and Substance or Reaction Explores due to Java not being compatible.’  Or, use  Ask Us!

MIT people love to make things and now that summer is here, perhaps you can make time to pick up that put-off  project or learn to use that tool everyone else (you think) already knows how to wield. The MIT Libraries has a place to get started.

Mechanical Engineering Librarian Angie Locknar has created a guide to the shops and tools on campus here:  http://libguides.mit.edu/make. “We wanted to have one place to go to find things that people might need if they like to invent/create/build … plus we’re hoping users will send other helpful links to include.”

Make this summer to design and make stuff!

MIT Libraries has subscribed to The American Society of Mechanical Engineers digital library for several years. Now it has a new interface!

ASME Digital Collections is the place to search for full text articles in ASME journals (all years) or for conference papers from 2002 – present.

AND…if you need a conference paper prior to 2002?  The Barker Engineering Library has thousands of ASME technical papers in its collections. Use the ASME Papers & Publications guide to locate them.  Or just Ask Us!

Move over ACME….Beep Beep!

Join us for a community open house celebrating the historic restoration of MIT’s Great Dome, and the opening of Barker Library’s 24-hour reading room.

DATE: Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 2-4pm

LOCATION: Barker Library Reading Room (10-500)

DETAILS: Remarks by President L. Rafael Reif. Refreshments to follow.

• Researching soil chemistry properties in the scholarly literature? What database does the Chemistry guide suggest?

• Not sure what the first settlers in Massachusetts grew in their gardens? Try the Historical Newspapers guide.

• Want to do market research on produce? Have you seen the Do-It-Yourself Market Research guide?

We even have guides about organizing your references, managing your data, getting published, and so much more! Seriously, think of a topic – any topic. Yep, we probably have that, too.

And you’re always welcome to ask us for help!

Thousands of research reports from national and international labs and other universities or contracting companies were sent to MIT and are kept in our Annex. The collection is particularly strong in energy, including the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and all its successor agencies (ERDA, DOE).  The research guide will help you find them. And because they are often the sources behind published journal articles or conference papers, they can provide fuller accounts of the research, including designs, experimental details or other practical information.

Bottom line?  As more literature gets digitized, more citations to technical reports are discovered. Dive into this world yourself, or Ask Us!

Statista provides statistics on a wide range of topics, including industries, markets, demography, countries & economies.  It harvests data from market researchers, trade associations, scientific publications, and government sources, and compiles it in a central place for you to search.  Download data in tabular or graphical form and link to original data sources and related reports.  Find statistics such as:

• Global market share held by the leading smartphone operating systems in sales to end users from 1st quarter 2009 to 4th quarter 2012
• Percentage of U.S. population who has (or ever had) cancer, 1999-2011, by age
• U.S. organic food sales growth forecast from 2010 to 2014
• Monthly unemployment rate in the U.S. from January 2012 to January 2013 (seasonally-adjusted)
• and more…

Access Statista at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/statista.

Researching local areas in the United States?  Govistics provides spending, revenue, employment and crime data for state and local governments and school districts across the U.S., pulling together data from different sources.  Find data such as the following for the City of Cambridge:

• Government spending and number of employees in all areas, including social services, education, and public safety
• Number of violent and property crimes
• Investment portfolio of the city’s retirement system, with data on membership and contributions
• and more…

Access Govistics at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/govistics.

Need data on your research topic but have no idea who collects it?  Try the Statistical Abstract of the United States!  This online reference source provides summary statistical tables of everything under the sun, and detailed citations to the original source for you to find more detailed data.  Search not only by subject but also filter your results to those available at certain demographic (e.g., age, sex, race, education, marital status), geographic (e.g., state, smsa), and economic (e.g., industry, occupation) breakdowns.  Find data such as:

• Nonfatal occupational injury and illness cases in private industry by type of injury or illness and days away from work: 2010
• Coastline counties most frequently hit by hurricanes: 1960 To 2008
• Municipal solid waste generation, materials recovery, combustion with energy recovery, and discards: 1980 to 2010
• Research and development expenditures in science and engineering at universities and colleges: 2000 to 2010

Access the Statistical Abstract at: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/stat-abstract.

Want further information on statistics and data resources?  Try Social Science Data Services or other data resources listed on our subject-oriented research guides.

Photo by L. Barry Hetherington

The Barker Library reading room has reopened to reveal the grandeur of the restored oculus atop the Great Dome. Read about the details of the project in MIT’s Great Dome is reborn.

Natural light, as well as additional lighting around the perimeter of the dome, brightens the entire space revealing beautiful architectural detail. Additional improvements include the installation of acoustic panels and a new sound-mitigation system that will help soften echoes and ambient noise. Comfortable chairs, large tables, and individual study carrels have also returned to the reading room, making it a perfect space for quiet study.

The reading room is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week to members of the MIT community with an MIT ID.

Within Desal Data you will find desalination plant listings, incorporating the IDA Inventory (a catalogue of desalination facilities contracted and under construction since 1945, based on over 25 years of annual industry surveys), market analysis and economic forecasting from Global Water Intelligence, company profiles and desalination news from countries worldwide.

You can find DesalData in VERA or use this URL http://libraries.mit.edu/get/desaldata

We welcome your feedback and hope this product supports the desalination work on campus!

Many of us used prefab programs to play games or do word processing, but the tinkerers among us wrote their own code, long and short, to explore what computers could do. Take this one-liner in BASIC language that Associate Professor of Digital Media Nick Montfort found in a magazine from the era: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Run it on a Commodore 64 (or an emulator on your laptop today), and diagonal slashes fill the screen in a random way, building a pleasing maze that continues until interrupted.

Montfort posted 10 PRINT to an online Critical Code Studies conference in winter 2010. A lively discussion ensued among a dozen participants including MIT librarian Patsy Baudoin, who is liaison to the Media Lab and the Foreign Languages and Literatures department. Though the code is short and there’s not much known about its history, “it was obvious that there was plenty to say about it,” says Montfort. “However concise it was, it clearly connected computation to creativity, and to culture, in really intriguing ways.”

A few months after the conference, Montfort asked the 10 PRINT thread contributors to collaborate on a book exploring different aspects of culture—mazes in literature and religion, randomness and chance in games and art, the programming language BASIC, the Commodore 64 computer—through the lens of that one line of code.

The book, whose title is the code, was published in December by MIT Press. Besides Montfort and Baudoin, the authors include John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample and Noah Vawter. Though 10 PRINT is freely downloadable under a Creative Commons license, its first print run nearly sold out within a month. (This is another example of increased sales accompanying open access.) Royalties go to the Electronic Literature Organization, a nonprofit that promotes writing, reading, and teaching digital fiction and poetry.

Baudoin, the lone librarian of the group, has a PhD in comparative literature, which she says proved useful during the year-and-a-half collaboration. “I understood implicitly that exploring a concise line of computer code was like reading a short poem,” she says. “[As a graduate student] I wrote a 50-page paper on Catullus’s Odi et amo, a two-line Latin poem. In one sense, this line of code doesn’t appear to do a lot, but analyzed carefully, it speaks loudly.”

10 PRINT has a lot to say about a specific time. Though we can easily edit video, chat online, and play music on our laptops today, “when it comes to allowing people to directly access computation and to use that computing power for creative, expressive, and conceptual purposes, today’s computers, out of the box, are much worse” than those of 30 years ago, says Montfort. “I can type in and run the 10 PRINT program within 15 seconds of turning my Commodore 64 on. I can modify it and explore the program quite extensively within a minute. How long would it take you to produce any program like that after you started up your Windows 8 system?”

Montfort is quick to note that his interest in code like 10 PRINT is not nostalgia for a lost era; this, he says, trivializes important ideas in computer history. 10 PRINT itself is far from trivial, which is why Montfort, Baudoin and their coauthors found it a worthy book topic. “This type of program was written and run by millions in the 1980s on their way to a deeper understanding of computation,” he says.

Find 10 PRINT events under “Upcoming” at http://nickm.com.

See also: MIT News coverage of the book

If you use Google Scholar, you already know it’s a great tool for finding citations to literature in your research area. It’s a massive index of articles, books and other publications of a scholarly nature. (It doesn’t cover ALL the scholarly literature in any discipline, however, so be sure to include the Libraries’ databases in Vera in your literature search.)

Many of the articles in Google Scholar are licensed by the MIT Libraries through our subscriptions, so – in many cases – the full text is available to you. If you are on campus, you’ll see this link in your results list:

Are you working off campus?   To take advantage of this feature, click on Settings and then Library Links.

Type MIT in the search window; select it; click Save.  You should now see the full text link in your results list for articles in any of MIT’s paid subscriptions.

To focus your Scopus search in the social sciences literature click the Social Science and Humanities button on the search screen:

Start searching Scopus now.

Each year Knovel invites engineering students worldwide to enter a competition designed to show the content and powerful search functions of this collection of sci/tech handbooks. One example is Patrick’s favorite feature, the Equation Plotter. “[This] … is a great way to quickly get property information without having to dig through the text to figure out the functional form used for a specific correlation,” he writes. Users can also input names of properties and ranges of data values to search for compounds that fit these bounds. At your fingertips is a digital library that, thanks to the MIT Libraries, will bring you specific answers as well as full texts to use in coursework or research.

The stories and headlines in Energywire can be searched by keyword or delivered to you through its alerting service. The top story in one recent alert highlighted MIT’s research on methane emissions and natural gas. Updates on oil shale, energy in the Arctic, geopolitics, water and energy, and business developments are all popular topics, along with many others.

As it says at the bottom of each daily alert, “Get all of the stories in today’s Energywire!”

Find it here: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/ew

Collier, A.J. 167. Williams coal mine 90 miles below Nulato, on Yukon River.

Detailed computer simulation shows how a patch of nutrients gets distributed in turbulent water. Image courtesy of Roman Stocker and John Taylor

Scientists have long believed that ocean-dwelling microorganisms need not move to gather food because turbulence distributes nutrients uniformly. Using a computer model that simulates a turbulent sea, Civil and Environmental Engineering associate professor Roman Stocker and colleague John R. Taylor have shown that some bacteria swim for food and others don’t, and that there are advantages and disadvantages to both. The study, published in the journal Science last week, is the first to show how the ocean environment affects feeding strategy. “We’re working at the interface between microbiology and fluid dynamics,” Stocker told the MIT News.

Explore Professor Stocker’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 viaDSpace@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.

Explore Professor Balakrishnan’s research and Professor Katabi’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.

Barker Reading Room, photo by L. Barry Hetherington

Renovations to the Barker Library Reading Room have recently been expanded in scope and complexity. As is often the case with historic restoration, previously undetected structural issues have been detected and need to be addressed. At the same time this work will also allow for additional lighting enhancements to be made. Interior scaffolding will now be expanded, and will fill the remaining floor space in the Reading Room, making the room inaccessible to students and faculty for the duration of the project. The closure is effective October 18, 2012.

The Libraries understand the inconvenience this closure will cause, and sincerely regret the mid-semester disruption to student work and study habits. Library staff will make every effort to assist students in finding other suitable study spaces within the Libraries. While the Reading Room is closed, library users can find alternative spaces for studying in Barker Library on floors six through eight, as well as in other library locations.

Barker Library’s Reading Room is still expected to reopen early in 2013. At that time the Libraries also expect to debut a new entryway to the reading room that will give students 24/7 access to the newly renovated space. For more details about the renovations, see the September 28, 2012 MIT Tech article. Stay informed of progress by checking the Barker Library website or following @mitlibraries on Twitter.

Explore Professor Hosoi’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.

Barker Reading Room, photo by L. Barry Hetherington

August 1, 2012 UPDATE–On August 14, Barker Library’s main reading room will close temporarily to allow for restoration work to the Great Dome’s ceiling, as well as renovations to the reading room itself. Most of the disruptive work is expected to be completed during August, allowing the reading room to reopen by, or shortly after, the start of the fall term.

May 14, 2012–After Commencement on June 8, 2012 the Barker Library Reading Room will close for the summer to allow for renovations to the Reading Room and Dome. The Reading Room is expected to reopen in September 2012 for the fall term, although renovations will continue through December with occasional minor disruptions.

As part of the project, a new entrance will be added to the Reading Room to make it accessible as a 24-hour study space. An around-the-clock Reading Room under the iconic Dome will significantly expand students’ options for late night study on campus. Currently the Libraries offer secure 24/7 study areas in both Hayden and Dewey libraries, the addition of the Barker Reading Room will more than triple the amount of space currently available for 24/7 study. The Libraries expect to inaugurate 24-hour service in Barker beginning in January 2013.

While the Reading Room is closed, library users can find alternative spaces for studying in Barker Library on floors six through eight, as well as in other library locations. Stay informed of renovation closures and progress by checking the Barker Library website or following @mitlibraries on Twitter.

It is a problem familiar to most of us: The last ounces of ketchup just won’t shake free from the bottle, so we throw it out, wasting food and money. In May, the architects of a solution won the audience choice award at MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Scientists from the lab of mechanical engineering professor Kripa Varanasi invented a plant-based coating they call LiquiGlide, a slippery material that helps any condiment—from honey to mayonnaise—slide easily out of glass or plastic. “We’ve talked to various folks in the supply chain, from equipment makers to bottle makers to food companies, and they all love it and want it in their bottles,” Varanasi told the Boston Globe. Varanasi’s lab has also created surfaces and coatings that keep frost off planes and allow water to flow more efficiently through pipes.

Explore Professor Varanasi’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.

Where: 14N-132

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 this session. For more information, please contact Howard Silver with any questions.

“I signed the petition simply because I believe that if taxpayers fund research, they should have access to the results of that research without going through a paywall,” says EECS Professor Seth Teller.

Those taxpayers would not have access to government-funded research if Elsevier has its way. Elsevier supports the Research Works Act (RWA), which would prohibit the government from requiring authors to openly share articles that result from the research it funds, thus making the existing NIH Public Access Policy, or any others like it, illegal.

For Professor Scott Aaronson, “signing this petition was a no-brainer.” He “started boycotting Elsevier and most other commercial publishers as a graduate student, because the economic model didn’t make sense” to him. “I couldn’t understand why academics were (1) donating their papers to publishers like Elsevier, (2) signing away their copyrights, (3) asking their universities’ libraries to buy *back* the papers at exorbitant, ever-increasing costs, and (4) even reviewing the papers (an onerous burden) free of charge, all while I could see for myself that the publishers were providing little or no ‘value-added,’ since most people just downloaded the papers from the arXiv or the authors’ homepages anyway.”

For Professor Aaronson, this boycott has been a long time coming. “I’ve simply been waiting for what I saw as the inevitable moment when a critical mass of academics would ‘wake up’ to the issue” that the existing publishing model, with ever-increasing prices, was “unsustainable,” he says. “Now that one of the greatest mathematicians on earth (Timothy Gowers) is spearheading the boycott movement, and dozens of other leading figures in the mathematical community have declared their support, that moment may have arrived.”

More information:

• Why Scientists are Boycotting a Publisher: Gareth Cook’s editorial in the Boston Globe
• Interview with Elsevier about the boycott, RWA, and more
• Elsevier Fact Sheet

Date: Friday, February 10, 2-4pm
Location: Maihaugen Gallery (14N-130)

A new exhibition in the Libraries’ Maihaugen Gallery explores glassmaking as revealed in glassware from MIT laboratories, blown glass from the MIT Glass Lab, and stunning stained glass windows from the Libraries’ Charles J. Connick Stained Glass Foundation Collection. Tools, early photographs, and selections from rare books demonstrate the combination of artistry and engineering that goes into the creation of glass.

This event is free and open to the community.

Date:  Monday, Nov. 7th
Time:  2-3pm
Place: 6-120

Bio: G. Sayeed Choudhury is the Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of Operations for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. He is the Principal Investigator for the Data Conservancy, one of the awards through NSF’s DataNet program. He has oversight for the digital library activities and services provided by the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University.

Business analyst data for Boston's Back Bay neighborhood

This package combines detailed data about business, consumer spending, demographics, segmentations, and major shopping centers with tools for analyzing geographically.

Find out more about the data types available and its capabilities.

Business Analyst Desktop is available in the MIT GIS Lab for teaching and research purposes. Business Analyst Online is also available for teaching in MIT classes. Contact gishelp@mit.edu with questions or if you would like access to Business Analyst Online for a class.