MIT Libraries News

The Humanities Library will hold its next Bookmobile on Fri., Oct. 5, from 11-2 in Lobby 10. Choose from books, DVDs, audiobooks and music for Columbus Day weekend.

Come check us out!

Need help with business or economics research? The Dewey Research Advisor (http://libraries.mit.edu/dra) can help you get started…

Dewey Research Advisor is an online database which provides starting points and tips for answering specific research questions in the fields of business & management and economics.

There are currently over 400 questions in the database; check out some of the new questions we’ve recently added:

• Where can I find rankings of companies?
• How can I find information on market research, including market research reports?
• Where can I find The Economist?
• Where can I find information on the medical devices industry?
• Where can I locate current and historical corporate and personal income tax rates by country?

To find these and other research questions, simply browse by subject or do a keyword search. And if you need further assistance from Dewey librarians, we are here to help you: just Ask Us!

Here are a few more new CDs that have recently arrived in the Lewis Music Library; they are also listed in Recent Additions to the Collection. Naxos discs are also available online.

Click on an image to see its Barton catalog record:

Bennett, Richard Rodney. Words & music. [Bennett] PhonCD B439 words	Bowen, Jeff. (Title of show): original cast recording. PhonCD B6745 title	Crumb, George. The river of life; Unto the hills. [Crumb, Orchestra 2001, Freeman] PhonCD C888 sel a v.10
The great war: an American musical fantasy. PhonCD F G3701.M5.G74	Lincoln, Abbey. Abbey sings Abbey. PhonCD J L638 song	Porter, Quincy. String quartets nos. 1-4. [Ives Quartet] PhonCD P834 quas1-4

Music CDs and DVDs circulate for 3 days (limit of 5, no renewals); the library’s collection contains over 17,000 CDs and more than 850 DVDs. The Lewis Music Library is located in Bldg. 14E-109 and library hours are posted on the web.

Between Spaces, A project by Wendy Jacob

Between At 6:45 and 6:46 PM on September 20, 2007, a performer will walk across a high wire installed between the Wolk Gallery and the Rotch Library stacks.

Wendy Jacobs, an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at MIT created this project for the Wolk Gallery.

This exhibit will be on view September 20 through December 21, 2007

The opening reception will be Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 5:30 PM.

The View from the Hotel Window, 1993-2000, an exhibit in Rotch Library from 9/12/07 until 10/11/07

“I started this project when I began traveling to visit hospitals for my collaborative book, “Restorative Gardens, The Healing Landscape, ” with Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs and Richard Enoch Kaufman (Yale University Press, 1998). At first the drawings offset the boredom hotel rooms impose, but as I kept drawing these assigned views I became fascinated by the visual disorientation that hotels impose on us all.”

-Sam Bass Warner, Visiting Professor, DUSP

This collection of drawings is on display on the main floor of Rotch library.

Library hours are:

Monday-Thursday 8:30am – 11pm
Friday 8:30am – 7pm
Saturday 1 – 6pm
Sunday 2 – 10pm

Consulting: Interested in one-on-one help with statistical analysis and software? The Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC) Statistical Consultant can help you via email or an in-person consultation. Contact her via our email form.

Workshops: Interested in learning statistical analysis software? Get an introduction to Stata, the package used in many departments at MIT. With hands-on exercises, learn how to import and manage datasets. Taught by the HMDC Statistical Consultant. Novices welcome!

When: two repeat sessions, attend either one of the following:

• Tuesday, October 2nd, 12-2pm or
• Friday, October 5th, 12-2pm

Where: E53-220, Dewey Library

Space is limited. To register, contact: Katherine McNeill-Harman, mcneillh@mit.edu.

The MIT Libraries are offering a new podcast series on scholarly publishing and copyright. Two episodes are available:

In “Transforming Scientific Communication,” Steve Gass, Head of Public Services, describes some problems with the existing model for scholarly publishing and offers his vision of positive changes that could be made.

Download the audio file. (6:27 minutes, 6 Mb)

In “Making a Difference: Pushing Back on DRM at MIT,” Anna Gold, Head of the Engineering and Science Libraries, tells the story of MIT’s rejection of Digital Rights Management technology when it was being imposed by a scholarly society for use of its technical papers here at MIT.

Download the audio file. (8:18 minutes, 7.7 Mb)

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:

http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves.

Please direct your comments to copyright-lib@mit.edu. For more information on scholarly publishing & copyright, please visit the Libraries’ Scholarly Publication website.

Fall GIS Lab workshops

This session will be offered twice: Friday, September 21 & Friday, October 19

Location: MIT GIS lab, Rotch Library (7-238)

The US Census holds an enormous amount of demographic information dating back to 1790. New and interesting relationships can often times be observed when looking at census data on a map. Come learn about what’s in the US Census and the tools available for mapping it.

Here are a few compact discs recently received in the Lewis Music Library; Naxos discs are also available online.

Click on an image to see the Barton catalog record:

Bacewicz, Grazyna Sonatas for violin & piano. [Plawner, Kupiec] PhonCD B121 vbpmu a	Bach, Johann Sebastian. Goldberg variations. [Dinnerstein] PhonCD B122 gold h	Farley, Carole. Classic American love songs / Arlen, Gershwin, Weill, Schwartz. PhonCD F2295 cla
50 Jahre neue Musik in Darmstadt. Vol. 1: 1946- 1996. PhonCD In785 1996 v.1	Joplin, Scott. Piano rags, 2. [Loeb] PhonCD J J747 piamu a v.2	Lang, Lang. Dragon songs. PhonCD L253 drag
Lovano, Joe. Kids: live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. [Lovano, Jones] PhonCD J L94 kids	Nas (Musician). Hip hop is dead. PhonCD P N1697 hip	Rostropovich, Mstislav. The glory of Rostropovich: 80th birthday tribute. PhonCD R739 glo v.1-8 & booklet

Music CDs and DVDs circulate for 3 days (limit of 5, no renewals); the library’s collection contains over 17,000 CDs and more than 850 DVDs. The Lewis Music Library is located in Bldg. 14E-109 and library hours are posted on the web.

Finding out about new titles in our collection is easy. Choose one of three ways:

• On the Web: New titles are posted weekly by subject on our Recent Additions to the Collections page.
• Via RSS Feed: Click on the RSS link next to any subject on our Recent Additions page to subscribe to the RSS feed. To find out about RSS feeds and how they can help you keep up-to-date, see the Libraries’ Guide to RSS.
• Via Email: See how you can get the content of Recent Additions RSS feeds delivered to your email.

Questions? Ask Us!

Fall GIS Lab workshops

Learn about GIS, and the basics of using ArcGIS, a powerful desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) available at MIT. Learn to work with data from the MIT Geodata Repository, analyze the data and create maps that can be used in reports and presentations.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Time: 10:00a–3:00p

Location: 10-105

Stop by and browse titles in diverse subject areas including Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering, Fiction, History, Linguistics, Management, Music & Miscellaneous. Some materials are free!

Open to the MIT Community only

Questions? Contact the Gifts Office at gifts-lib@mit.edu or x 3.5693

All proceeds benefit the Libraries’ Preservation Fund.

The MIT Libraries have an agreement with Harvard University’s Countway Library of Medicine that allows graduate students, research staff, and faculty to apply for borrowing privileges, and undergraduate students to apply for room use only.

You can apply for privileges using our online form.

Applicants will receive a Countway access card via email no later than 5 pm the next business day. If you need same day service, or are planning to come to the library anyway, you can still apply for privileges at the Hayden Reference Desk, M-F, 10 am – 5 pm.

This application only covers privileges at Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine. See full details about the MIT’s arrangements with Harvard Libraries.

Two new beta gadgets make searching resources of the MIT Libraries even easier! A new Facebook application and Google gadget will allow you to search the Libraries directly from your personal pages.

Facebook Application:

The Facebook application contains search boxes for the Barton web catalog and for Vera, the collection of online journals and databases, along with links to Your Account and Ask Us for research help.

If you already have a Facebook account, you’re only a few clicks away from adding the MIT Libraries application.

Google Gadget:

Did you know that you can personalize your Google homepage? Now, you can add a gadget to your Google page to search the collections of the MIT Libraries!

To add this gadget to your Google homepage, click this button:

You can also embed the gadget on any other webpage that you’ve created.

Thanks to Amy Stout, Nicole Hennig, Rob Wolfe, and Todd Rautenberg for developing these applications.

Want an efficient and informative way to select and organize your classes for the upcoming semester? The Course Pickr is is an interactive tool designed to help students organize their class schedules. It was developed at CSAIL by the Haystack Project, and is based on technology from Project SIMILE, a joint project of CSAIL and the MIT Libraries Digital Library Research Group (DLRG).

Students have access to course descriptions, times, locations, and data such as difficulty and units. Using a calendar, students can build schedules that allow them to see potential scheduling conflicts. The final calendars are easily printable for future reference.

Please note: this tool is in beta; consult MIT’s course catalogue for official data.

For more information, contact Amy Stout, astout@mit.edu.

The MIT Libraries have just launched a series of new online videos that can help you learn how to use the tools and resources of the libraries. Learn how to:

• renew books online and see what books you have checked out
• identify useful articles for research papers and locate the full text
• learn how to search article databases effectively (and why you are missing out if you just use Google)
• find books and other materials using the Barton catalog
• learn about all the different libraries on campus

We will be adding new videos over time – let us know what other topics you would like to see covered! There is a quick survey at the end of each tutorial – we’d like to know what you think of the videos and how they work as a medium for learning this information, so please give us your feedback!

If you have any questions, please contact: tutorials-lib@mit.edu

The Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC) repository has a new look. Now it provides an MIT portal to the repository (MIT Dataverse), highlighting data sets available to, and produced by, the MIT community. Other new features include an increased number of search fields.

Check it out at its same URL: http://libraries.mit.edu/get/hmdc.

We welcome your feedback on the new system; please send comments to Katherine McNeill-Harman, Data Services and Economics Librarian, mcneillh@mit.edu.

No formal entrance examination was required in MIT’s first few years, but by 1869 applicants had to pass a qualifying exam in four subjects: English, algebra, geometry, and arithmetic. For its September Object of the Month the Archives is exhibiting the exam in its display case in the hallway across from 14N-118 and on the Web. Take the test, check your answers, and find out more about MIT’s history on the web site of the Institute Archives and Special Collections.

MIT catalogs going back to 1865, examinations from the nineteenth century and later, and a variety of materials relating to students, professors, courses, and other subjects are available for use in the Archives reading room, Building 14N-118, Monday through Thursday, 10 am to 4 pm.