MIT Libraries News

Did you know there are business dissertations in ABI/Inform Global? Available from hundreds of colleges and universities, the database includes over 10,000 full-text doctoral-level dissertations. To find them, enter your keywords and then click on the “dissertations” tab on the search results page.

Spiraling costs, restrictions on access, and other disturbing trends are having a profound impact on how — and even whether — scholarly materials are made available to the academic community. The digital revolution should have made access to information simpler, more timely, and more democratic than ever. But ironically, business practices have arisen that actually impede the distribution of scholarly work.

Find out:

• What’s going on at MIT
• What’s going on nationally
• Why you should care and what you can do

Please help the Libraries welcome our new Computer Science Librarian, Amy Stout. Amy will be supporting faculty, staff and students in the EECS department who are studying and researching in Computer Science areas, including the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Information Decision Systems. Amy can be reached at astout@mit.edu or by phone at x3-4442. Tracy Gabridge (tag@mit.edu, x3-8971) will continue to support the aspects of Course 6 related to Electrical Engineering.

Amy comes to us from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole where she was recently the Digital Systems and Services Coordinator. She has been involved with their Digital Herbarium project, has supported the MBL/National Library of Medicine biomedical informatics class, and has been implementing DSpace and LOCKSS (an electronic archival system for journal content). She comes to us with a lot of talent and skill in several areas of information technology as well as having an excellent commitment to serving the needs of researchers. Amy received her MLIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics from St. John’s College in New Mexico. Due to some really interesting work in the Peace Corps, Amy has knowledge of Hungarian (in addition to French, Turkish and Spanish and more).

By popular demand, the publication “Specifications for Thesis Preparation” is once again available on the Archives web site in HTML form, as well as PDF. If you want the entire booklet, you can print the PDF version. If you only need to refer to a particular section, use the links from the Table of Contents in the HTML version.

GIS classes introducing students to general and advanced concepts in visualizing and analyzing geographic information will be offered Jan. 24- Feb. 2. To see a class listing visit: http://libraries.mit.edu/gis/teach/iap2006.html. Students will learn to work with a variety of GIS tools and data types in these hands-on classes. Register now to guarantee a spot.

Good news for Factiva users: this database, previously compatible only with Internet Explorer, has expanded its browser options. The Search and News modules now can be used with:

• Firefox 1.0.2 and above on Windows and Macintosh
• Safari 1.2 and above on Macintosh

Note: the Companies/Markets module still must be used with Internet Explorer.

Factiva hopes to have more of its features compatible with different browsers in the future. For updates, go to Factiva:

• click Support (upper right corner of the screen)
• under Search our FAQs, enter “browsers”
• Select product: Factiva.com
• Select product area: all areas
• Click Search
• Select “Through which web browsers is global.factiva.com supported?”

The Institute Archives and Special Collections houses the historical record of MIT in the form of over 500 separate collections. Guides (“finding aids”) to a number of these administrative collections are now available online as PDF documents. Among them are the records of the president and the chancellor during Jerome Wiesner’s presidency (1971-1980) and the records of the Servomechanisms Lab (1940-1959).

In the course of processing a collection, the records are arranged, described, and housed for permanent storage. The end product is a finding aid—the tool that provides information about what is in the collection and helps researchers find the materials they need. Hundreds of guides to collections are available for use in the Archives reading room, 14N-118, and the Archives will continue to add them to its web site.

On Monday, November 14, 2005 at 3:30 p.m. there will be a celebration of MIT’s latest solar power installation at Hayden Memorial Library. The MIT community is invited to join President Susan Hockfield and Director of Libraries Ann Wolpert for an official ribbon-cutting, remarks and refreshments. The event will be held outside the Hayden Memorial Library entrance on the first-floor of Building 14.

The solar panel installation on Hayden’s roof is the third and largest on MIT’s campus. MIT installations on the roofs of Hayden, the Student Center and Building N52 were part of the MIT Community Solar Power Initiative funded by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust.

For more information about the Hayden solar panel installation see http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/solarpower.html.

MIT Libraries’ DSpace project is profiled as “one of the largest digital asset management projects in history” in a Campus Technology article on Digital Libraries- ‘Opening’ a Digital Library (September 2005).

MIT Libraries Associate Director for Technology, MacKenzie Smith discusses the proliferation of digital information and the challenge of preserving and making it accessible for years to come in Eternal Bits: How can we preserve digital files and save our collective memory (IEEE Spectrum, July 2005)

Author Simson Garfinkel reveals the premise behind DSpace, how it works, and why it’s so important to researchers in MIT’s DSpace Explained (Technology Review, July 2005).

This month’s Object of the Month exhibit by the Institute Archives and Special Collections highlights the growing number of MIT theses available electronically in DSpace. The paper copies of the more than 110,000 theses written since the first class graduated in 1868 are among the collections in the Institute Archives. The Archives also holds the official records of the Institute, papers of MIT faculty members, MIT publications, and rare books.

Each month the Archives exhibits an “object” to illustrate the richness and variety of its collections and invite their further exploration. A poster is displayed in the exhibit case opposite Room 14N-118 (and the following month in the Libraries’ kiosk at the Stata Center), and a version is created for the Web. Browsing the exhibits at http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/exhibits-object.html may whet your appetite for more information about MIT’s history and the extraordinary men and women who are a part of that history.

Try the new Self Checkout Machine at Dewey Library! Use the machine to check out your own books and journals; simply swipe your MIT ID card and scan the book. To check out other items, or for questions about the machine, go to the Dewey Circulation Desk. And remember, you can renew and manage your library materials using Your Account.

Ever wonder: Where you are? Where you are going? How you could record the geographic location of things? A Global Positioning System (GPS) can help you with all these things!

The MIT GIS Lab, a collaboration between the MIT Libraries and IS&T Academic Computing, have made GPS (Global Positioning Systems) available for checkout from the Rotch Library circulation desk. If you have questions email gishelp@mit.edu.

The Virtual Reference Collection is a collection of free and subscribed (MIT-only) general reference sources organized into an online reference shelf.

You can find:

• acronyms
• almanacs
• consumer information
• conversion factors
• dictionaries + thesauri
• directories
• encyclopedias + yearbooks
• quotations
• style manuals (including the Mayfield Handbook)
• weather

and much more!

authors@mit presents:

Yossi Sheffi, author of “The Resilient Enterprise”

Please join us as MIT Professor and international expert in supply chain management Yossi Sheffi shows us how companies can reduce their vulnerability to high-impact disruptions – the topic explored in his book The Resilient Enterprise (The MIT Press, 2005).

Location: MIT 32-141, Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge
Time: November 1 (Tuesday), 6pm

For more information, please see: MIT Press Bookstore Events

Co-sponsored by the MIT Libraries and the MIT Press.

On November 1st and 8th the MIT Libraries will host a group of nine librarians from the National University Library of Kosovo. The Kosovar librarians will learn about MIT’s libraries, the benefits and challenges of digital information, integrated library computer systems and contemporary management techniques. While in the U.S., the librarians will also take classes at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science as part of a program funded by the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The goal of the program is to introduce the Kosovar librarians to new skills and systems that can be used in support of university librarianship in Kosovo.