News from the MIT Press

Digitization project provides access to hundreds of backlist titles

MIT Press’ Kelly McDougall and Amy Brand

 

The MIT Press and the Internet Archive are partnering, with support from Arcadia, to scan, preserve, and enable libraries to lend hundreds of MIT Press books that are currently not available digitally. This partnership represents an important advance in bringing acclaimed titles across the MIT Press’ publications in science, technology, art, and architecture to a global online audience.

The joint initiative is a crucial early step in Internet Archive’s ambitious plans to digitize and provide public access to four million books, by partnering widely with university presses and other publishers to source print works, and enable readers to borrow the digital versions from any library that owns the physical book, as well as from archive.org

An initial group of 1,500 MIT Press titles will be scanned at Internet Archive’s Boston Public Library facility, including Cyril Stanley Smith’s 1980 book, From Art to Science: Seventy-Two Objects Illustrating the Nature of Discovery, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Theodora Kimball’s Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, which was published in 1973. The group’s oldest title is Arthur C. Hardy’s 1936 Handbook of Colorimetry. The full set of 1,500 deep backlist works should be available by the end of 2017.