MIT Libraries

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About us

Our Mission

The mission of the MIT Libraries is to create and sustain an evolving information environment that advances learning, research, and innovation at MIT. We are committed to excellence in services, strategies, and systems that promote discovery, preserve knowledge, and improve worldwide scholarly communication.
— Adopted 2003, November 2013 revision

About the Libraries

Supporting teaching, learning, research, and innovation at MIT and globally, the Libraries connect faculty and students—wherever they are—to the best scholarly information available. Expert staff, state-of-the-art technologies, and abundant resources serve every part of the Institute, bridging disciplines and communities across campus. The Libraries advance knowledge at MIT and beyond in many ways.

  • Increasing access. Each year, the MIT community downloads tens of millions of items from the Libraries, and performs more than 45 million searches on scholarly databases. The Libraries are a leader in Open Access; scholarly works by MIT authors that have been made freely available have been downloaded more than 6.7 million times around the world. In addition, partnerships with other top research libraries give the MIT community access to materials from libraries worldwide.
  • Preserving knowledge. MIT is at the forefront of disseminating groundbreaking research and scholarship and of ensuring its accessibility for future use, tackling the complex issues of preserving digital information. The Institute Archives and Special Collections serve as the “memory” of MIT and contain its founding documents and the personal papers of noted faculty.
  • Providing community spaces. Five library locations offer welcoming spaces for quiet study or collaboration, with some accessible 24/7. The Libraries sponsor more than 400 events each year, including classes, wellness events, and an Institute-wide reading program.
  • Engaging in research and development. The Libraries’ interdisciplinary research and development efforts aim to tackle complex challenges in developing new, sustainable models for producing, using, managing, sharing, preserving, and discovering scholarly information in a digital age.

MIT Libraries Organizational chart (pdf)