MIT Libraries has created two new collections in DSpace@MIT, MIT’s institutional repository, making the majority of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) technical reports and memos available to the public. This work is a recent example of MIT Libraries’ staff fulfilling our enduring vision of a digital-first library that prioritizes supporting computational research and open scholarship, which includes research outputs beyond journal articles and theses. 

Researchers in the Laboratory for Computer Science, one of the precursor labs to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), published more than 1,100 technical reports and memos from 1974 through 2003. Over a decade ago, the documents were scanned and shared on a CSAIL website, but that site is no longer publicly accessible.

In addition to providing persistent URLs for long-term and easily citable access, inclusion in DSpace@MIT also means that they’re available through the repository’s full text keyword search, OAI-PMH feed, and REST API; MIT Libraries’ Search Our Collections and Timdex; and are indexed in external searches systems like Google Scholar. Prior to deposit, the documents were run through optical character recognition (OCR) software, so what were originally just images of the paper documents are now machine readable and the full text is indexed for searching.

While DSpace@MIT’s largest collections are for open access articles and student theses, there are also many other research outputs from a wide range of departments, labs, and centers, including working papers, project documentation, newsletters, presentations, open educational resources, and tech reports and memos like the ones from LCS! 

For additional history on the Laboratory for Computer Science and Project MAC, check out these archival collections:

• Laboratory for Computer Science records (AC-0268)
• Laboratory for Computer Science research records (AC-0282)
• Oral history interviews on computers at MIT (MC-0131)