MIT Receives Grant from The Mellon Foundation to Support Postdoctoral Research Program
MIT has received a grant of $750,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a postdoctoral research program on equitable and open scholarship. The program will be part of the MIT Libraries’ Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Support from The Mellon Foundation will allow CREOS to recruit, hire, and support recent PhD graduates from a range of disciplines for two-year appointments, beginning in 2021. CREOS’ research agenda is focused on three areas: incentives and barriers to equitable and open scholarship; impacts of equitable and open scholarship; and economic models for equitable and open scholarship.
Distinctive Collections Introduces a New Request System
Notebooks from the The Harold “Doc” Edgerton manuscript collection, Distinctive Collections.
This summer the Libraries rolled out a new request system for users of Distinctive Collections. Aeon, used by archives and special collections research centers across the country, allows users to place, schedule, and track requests for on-site visits, as well as order, pay for, and receive delivery of digital copies of materials. “Gone are the days of paper of call slips and lengthy registration forms filled out by hand,” said department head Emilie Hardman. “The Aeon project is part of system-wide changes we have made to provide more user-friendly service, whether it’s for a researcher who wants to visit the reading room, a remote user ordering a digital copy, or a faculty member requesting teaching materials.” The new system has already helped Distinctive Collections better serve users while the reading room remains closed due to the coronavirus pandemic—advanced requests have helped the department work with limited staffing to achieve the quickest turn-around possible on digitizing materials from the collections.
