Tag: MIT Libraries

CREOS awarded new grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

By on August 19, 2021

On July 31, 2021, CREOS was awarded a grant from IMLS to conduct research and develop open, reliable, standardized indicators that go beyond measures of “overall impact” to advance the understanding of who is, and who is not, participating in open scholarship. The indicators will support the evaluation of large-scale interventions, benchmark comparisons, and monitor the health of the scholarly information ecosystem over time. Micah Altman will lead this three-year project that begins in September 2021.

There is evidence that scholarly processes have bias and create barriers to inclusion; more openness in scholarly communication is needed. Progress towards a better scholarly ecosystem requires standard, reliable measures of the desired attributes of a better system. This project will produce standardized indicators that describe the volume and types of open science output systematically over time.

IMLS awarded $321,557 to create measures based on open bibliometric data, web and social-media mining, and community input.

You can read the full proposal on the IMLS web site.

CREOS hires three postdoctoral associates as a part of Mellon Foundation award

By bbarnett on August 16, 2021

The 2020 Mellon Foundation award to CREOS to fund three postdoctoral associates for two years each is ramping up for September 2021 after a one-year delay due to the pandemic. Faculty members Stephanie Ann Frampton, Roger Levy, and Rebecca Saxe, along with CREOS staff and library staff Ye Li and Mark Szarko, will be thought partners and mentor the incoming postdocs.

Corey Johnson, PhD, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University, will work with Stephanie Frampton, associate professor of literature and faculty director of the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities, to conduct a research project to advance equity and accessibility of archives and special collections. Johnson is considering a focus on digital access to indigenous collections when the original materials were only intended for a limited audience.
Suman Maity, PhD, Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, will work with Professor Roger Levy in Brain and Cognitive Science to conduct a research project on computational social science for scholarly communications and open and equitable science.
Ashley Thomas, PhD, Cognitive Science, UC Irvine will work with faculty member Rebecca Saxe, John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, to develop a new course at MIT and conduct research on tools for rigorous and reproducible research.

For more information about Johnson, Maity, and Thomas, please check the CREOS website. We are looking forward to having them join us in September and October.

Celebrate Pride

By on June 11, 2018

Pride Rainbow Flag
It’s Pride Month! Check out this year’s most recent highlights from the MIT Libraries’ collection of LGBTQIA+ works! All of the items listed are available at MIT Libraries or via Borrow Direct.

Fiction

Tiger’s Daughter | K. Arsenault Rivera

Afterparty | Daryl Gregory

A Line in the Dark | Malinda Lo

The Wanderers | Meg Howrey

Crossroads of Canopy | Thoraiya Dyer

Giovanni’s Room | James Baldwin

The Object of My Affection | Stephen McCauley

After Delores | Sarah Schulman

The Black Tides of Heaven | Jy Yang

Queer Praxis | Dustin Bradley Goltz

Sodom Road Exit | Amber Dawn

Poetry

Take Me With You | Andrea Gibson

IRL | Tommy Pico

Nonfiction

Surpassing Certainty | Janet Mock

Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me | Ana Castillo

Zami, A New Spelling of My Name | Audre Lorde

Ezili’s mirrors :imagining Black queer genders | Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Critically sovereign :indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies | Joanne Barker, editor

Tomorrow will be different : love, loss, and the fight for trans equality | Sarah McBride

Graphic Novel

Queer: A Graphic History | Meg John Barker + Julia Scheele

My Solo Exchange Diary | Nagata Kabi

Pregnant butch : nine long months spent in drag | A.K. Summers

Body music | Julie Maroh ; translation of David Homel

Reality Bytes: Utilizing VR and AR in the Library Space

By on June 12, 2017

Terms like “virtual reality” and “augmented reality” have existed for a long time. In recent years, thanks to products like Google Cardboard and games like Pokemon Go, an increasing number of people have gained firsthand experience with these once-exotic technologies. The MIT Libraries are no exception to this trend. The Program on Information Science has conducted enough experimentation that we would like to share what we have learned and solicit ideas for further investigation.

This discussion will present participants with a firsthand opportunity to not only to hear about the ongoing learning in the VR and AR space in the MIT Libraries, but to also witness some of these technologies in action – both for viewing and creating relevant content. A variety of data will be shared and collected during the discussion.

Matt Bernhardt is a web developer at the MIT Libraries with a wide-ranging interest in technology – including digital fabrication and data visualization. A graduate of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State, he has been interested in how physical spaces and shapes can be represented digitally since the days of Zork and Snow Crash.

Event Details
Location: E25-401
We will provide lunch, please bring your own drink and your questions.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consist of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social, and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.

June 21, 2017 12 - 1pm

SolarSPELL: The Solar Powered Educational Learning Library

By on March 21, 2017

Access to high-quality, relevant information is absolutely foundational for a quality education. Yet, so many schools across the developing world lack fundamental resources, like textbooks, libraries, electricity and Internet connectivity. The SolarSPELL (Solar Powered Educational Learning Library) is designed specifically to address these infrastructural challenges, by bringing relevant, digital educational content to offline, off-grid locations. This talk will examine the design, development, and deployment of this for-the-field technology that looks simple but has a quite complex background.

SolarSPELL is a portable, ruggedized, solar-powered digital library that broadcasts a webpage with open-access educational content over an offline WiFi hotspot, content that is curated for a particular audience in a specified locality — in this case, for schoolchildren and teachers in remote locations. It is a hands-on, iteratively developed project that has involved undergraduate students in all facets and at every stage of development.

Laura Hosman
Hosman is assistant professor at Arizona State University, holding a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and in The Polytechnic School. Her work is action-oriented and focuses on the role for information and communications technology (ICT) in developing countries. Presently, she focuses on ICT-in-education projects, and brings her passion for experiential learning to the classroom by leading real-world-focused, project-based courses that have seen student-built technology deployed in schools in Haiti, Vanuatu, Micronesia, Samoa, and Tonga.

Event Details
Location: E25-202
We will provide lunch; please bring your own drink and your questions.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consists of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.

April 19, 2017 12 - 1pm

2016 Election Debrief Panel

By mit-admin on November 16, 2016

UPDATE: A recording of this event is available to view online on Facebook

Come join us for an election debrief panel that will include experts from the MIT faculty in the US political process, civic engagement, voting rights, economic inequality, technology policy, racial attitudes, and international student issues.

This event will create a space for MIT students and community members to ask questions about and discuss procedural aspects of US politics, how this election may shape the future for the US, the world, and MIT—and what students can do.

The discussion will be moderated by Professor Ed Bertschinger, the Institute Community and Equity Officer. The panel will include:

Ceasar McDowell, Professor of the Practice of Community Development
Amy Glasmeier, Professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning
Ariel White, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ken Oye, Associate Professor of Political Science and Engineering Systems
David Elwell, Associate Dean and Director, International Students Office

Event Details:

Kirsch Auditorium 32-123
All community members welcome.
Refreshments will be provided.

This event is sponsored by the Graduate Student Council, Undergrad Association, and MIT Libraries.

November 18, 2016 4 - 5:30pm

International Tangier: Exhibit in Rotch Library

By on November 10, 2016

An exhibit at Rotch Library features never-before-exhibited photographs of the early 20th–century International Zone of Tangier, Morocco. For centuries European powers battled one another and Moroccan forces for control of the city of Tangier, due to its strategic location on the Straits of Gibraltar, the point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. In 1924 an agreement made the city a demilitarized “International Zone” administered by a group of officials from other countries, yet still nominally under Moroccan sovereignty. With the exception of a period of five-year occupation by the Spanish during World War II, some variation of this arrangement remained in place until the city was returned to Moroccan sovereignty in 1956.

An exhibition at Rotch Library, curated by Michael A. Toler, PhD, highlights this period with prints made from the glass negatives collection of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM) in Morocco. The photographs date from roughly 1900 to 1930, a period during which the city of Tangier underwent a transformation that has been unrivaled until the growth of recent decades. Not only is Tangier now seeing a radical transformation due to new construction and infrastructure improvements, but there is also a growing emphasis on historic preservation of the built environment. The exhibition juxtaposes the older black and white images against more recent photographs appearing on the image labels.

The exhibition is hosted by the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC@MIT) and organized in collaboration with the Program in Middle Eastern Studies of Wellesley College. It highlights a collaboration between AKDC, Wellesley’s Middle Eastern Studies Program, and Wellesley’s Office of Career Education to assist TALIM in the preservation of TALIM’s glass negatives collection. In the summers between 2013 and 2016, interns from Wellesley College went to Tangier and scanned all 2,000 negatives in TALIM’s collection, creating high resolution surrogates so the originals could be placed in cold storage. A catalog of the collection has been made available on Archnet.

AKDC@MIT and Wellesley College’s Middle Eastern Studies Program will host a joint reception for “International Tangier” on November 17 at 7:30pm.

An online version of the exhibitions will appear on Archnet soon after the reception.

Issues in curating the open web at scale

By on September 1, 2016

Gary Price

Much of the web remains invisible: resources are undescribed, unindexed or simply buried — as many people rarely look past the first page of Google searches or are unavailable from traditional library resources. At the same time, many traditional library databases pay little attention to quality content from credible sources accessible on the open web.

How do we build collections of quality open-web resources (i.e. documents, specialty databases, and multimedia) and make them accessible to individuals and user groups when and where they need it? This talk reflects on the emerging tools for systematic programmatic curation; the legal challenges to open-web curation; long-term access issues, and the historical challenges to building sustainable communities of curation.

Event details
Location: E25-401
Lunch will be provided

About Gary Price
Price received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kansas, and a master’s in library and information science from Wayne State University. He was for a time a reference librarian at George Washington University. Price co-authored the book The Invisible Web (see Deep Web) with Chris Sherman in July 2001. Price has worked as a librarian at George Washington University and by the search engine Ask.com as Director of Online Information Resources. He also does frequent consulting projects and has written for a number of publications. Currently, he is a contributing editor at Search Engine Land. Before launching INFOdocket.com and FullTextReports.com in February 2011, Gary Price and Shirl Kennedy worked together for 10 years as founders and co-editors of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker. Price won the Special Libraries Association‘s “Innovations in Technology Award” in 2002, and their News Division‘s “Agnes Henebry Roll of Honor Award” in 2004. He was also awarded the Alumni of the Year Award from Wayne State’s Library and Information Program.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consist of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.

September 20, 2016 12 - 1pm

Confidential Information: Storage, Sharing & Publication

By on June 14, 2016

This class focuses on the tools and good practices for storing confidential data, sharing data for collaboration, and publishing data or derivative results for broad use. Topics covered in this class include: an overview of information security standards and frameworks; information security core practices (credentials, authentication, authorization, and auditing); information partitioning and secure linking; file, disk, and network encryption tools and practices; cloud storage practices for confidential information; data “de-identification” tools and practices; statistical disclosure limitation approaches and tools; and data use agreements.

Event Details
Location: E25-401
Register
The course will be presented in a half-day format. Individual consultations may be scheduled with Micah Altman by contacting Kelly Hopkins at khopkins@mit.edu.

Discussant Bio: Micah Altman, PhD, is Director of Research and Head/Scientist, Program on Information Science for the MIT Libraries, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Altman is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. Prior to arriving at MIT, Altman served at Harvard University for 15 years as the Associate Director of the Harvard-MIT Data Center, Archival Director of the Henry A. Murray Archive, and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences.

Altman conducts work primarily in the fields of social science, information privacy, information science and research methods, and statistical computation—focusing on the intersections of information, technology, privacy, and politics; and on the dissemination, preservation, reliability and governance of scientific knowledge.

July 19, 2016 12 - 3pm