MIT Libraries News

The 50th anniversary of Sputnik is observed in the October Object of the Month exhibit of the Institute Archives & Special Collections. After the surprise launch of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed MIT’s James R. Killian the first Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Killian chaired the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which was instrumental in initiating national curriculum reforms in science and technology and in establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Sputnik 1 mockup - NASA image

Between Spaces, A project by Wendy Jacob

Between At 6:45 and 6:46 PM on September 20, 2007, a performer will walk across a high wire installed between the Wolk Gallery and the Rotch Library stacks.

Wendy Jacobs, an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at MIT created this project for the Wolk Gallery.

This exhibit will be on view September 20 through December 21, 2007

The opening reception will be Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 5:30 PM.

The View from the Hotel Window, 1993-2000, an exhibit in Rotch Library from 9/12/07 until 10/11/07

“I started this project when I began traveling to visit hospitals for my collaborative book, “Restorative Gardens, The Healing Landscape, ” with Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs and Richard Enoch Kaufman (Yale University Press, 1998). At first the drawings offset the boredom hotel rooms impose, but as I kept drawing these assigned views I became fascinated by the visual disorientation that hotels impose on us all.”

-Sam Bass Warner, Visiting Professor, DUSP

This collection of drawings is on display on the main floor of Rotch library.

Library hours are:

Monday-Thursday 8:30am - 11pm
Friday 8:30am - 7pm
Saturday 1 - 6pm
Sunday 2 - 10pm

No formal entrance examination was required in MIT’s first few years, but by 1869 applicants had to pass a qualifying exam in four subjects: English, algebra, geometry, and arithmetic. For its September Object of the Month the Archives is exhibiting the exam in its display case in the hallway across from 14N-118 and on the Web. Take the test, check your answers, and find out more about MIT’s history on the web site of the Institute Archives and Special Collections.

MIT catalogs going back to 1865, examinations from the nineteenth century and later, and a variety of materials relating to students, professors, courses, and other subjects are available for use in the Archives reading room, Building 14N-118, Monday through Thursday, 10 am to 4 pm.

In the 1980s MIT students and faculty members embarked on an exploration of human-powered flight. The August Object of the Month exhibit of the Institute Archives and Special Collections describes the project that produced the Daedalus, in which Kanellos Kanellopoulos made the record-breaking flight from Crete to Santorin in 1988. The records of Project Daedalus are available for research in the Archives reading room, Building 14N-118.

Treading on History: Photographs of Contemporary Italy
Mary Pat McNally
June 1, 2007 - June 30, 2007
located at Rotch Library,
which is open Monday - Thursday 9AM - 7PM and Friday 9AM - 6PM.

When photographer Mary Pat McNally first ventured to Italy in 1999, she was impressed by the marks of modern culture on the historic cities and eternal landscapes. Sometimes it was graffiti on an ancient wall; sometimes a motor boat waiting in a Venetian canal.

“It intrigued me the way life goes on in Italy amid the splendor of the past,” McNally explained. “You will see people going about their daily lives in the shadows of great cathedrals, and hanging out their laundry between buildings that date back to the Middle Ages or earlier. Sometimes the residents of a thousand year old town appear blind to the fact that they are treading on history.”

That first trip led to many more. A selection of her photographs, taken over the course of several journeys to Italy, will be on display during the month of June in the Rotch Library, located on the MIT campus. McNally earned a diploma in photography from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley College, and is currently working as a graphic designer at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

The MIT Archives’ June Object of the Month is Francis H. Bacon’s “Log of the Dorian,” being, in Bacon’s words, ” the Account of a Voyage in a small Boat in the Year 1878-79 from England to the Mediterranean by way of Belgium and Holland, and up the Rhine to the Danube, down to the Black Sea and through the Aegean to Athens, with Sketches made by Himself.”

Bacon’s handwritten journal, containing his watercolors, sketches, and other illustrations, is available for research in the Institute Archives and Special Collections, Building 14N-118.

The May Object of the Month exhibit by the Institute Archives and Special Collections is about the physics of baseball, featuring a 1965 letter from Vannevar Bush to his MIT colleague Harold Edgerton in response to a batch of multiflash baseball pictures Edgerton had sent him. Included in the exhibit is a page from Edgerton’s notebook showing two of the photos of the type sent to Bush.

The papers of Bush and Edgerton are available for research in the Archives.

To celebrate the 146th anniversary of the founding of MIT (April 10, 1861), the Institute Archives and Special Collections showcases The Rogers Building, Boston, 1866-1938 — MIT’s First Building — as its April Object of the Month. The exhibit includes photographs of the inside of the building as well as links to related exhibits about MIT’s years as “Boston Tech.”

Learn more about MIT at the Institute Archives and Special Collections (14N-118) — The Source for MIT History.

For March the Institute Archives and Special Collections has chosen “VooDoo, vol. 1, no. 1 (March, 1919): Student Humor at MIT” for its Object of the Month exhibit. Learn more about VooDoo and its mascot, Phosphorus the cat.

The Object of the Month is also displayed in an exhibit case across from the Archives, Room 14N-118.

The Humanities Library will hold its next Bookmobile on Thursday, February 15, from 11am – 2pm at the Information Intersection in the Stata Center.

Line up and take your pick from selected books, DVDs, audiobooks and music for Presidents’ Day weekend.

Also check out Lewis Library’s extended CD/DVD offer.

The February Object of the Month exhibit of the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections includes a letter written in 1961 by Charles Stark Draper, Director of MIT’s Instrumentation Lab (now the Draper Lab), to NASA volunteering as a crew member on the Apollo mission to the moon.

The Object of the Month is also displayed in an exhibit case across from the Archives, Room 14N-118.

Where: MIT GIS Lab, Rotch Library, 7-238

Play with virtual globes like
Google Earth &
World Wind

Explore powerful geographic information systems (GIS), such as
ArcGIS and
PCI Geomatica

Investigate tools for mapping US Census and Demographic information such as
PCensus
Geolytics
Census Tool on the MIT Geodata Repository

Come meet the GIS staff from the MIT Libraries and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education over refreshments.

Library Music: Silence Into Sound, an exciting installation of immersive sonic experiences, will offer a demonstration/workshop today from 2-5 pm in the MIT Lewis Music Library (Building 14E-109).

Students from the MIT Media Lab will explain their ideas and technologies, the Lewis Music Library staff will share some of the library’s hidden treasures, and refreshments will be served.

See this Media Lab page for more information about the installations.

Don’t miss this opportunity to make noise in the Lewis Music Library!!

Ten interactive music installations created by MIT Media Lab grad students will be installed in the Lewis Music Library beginning at 2 pm on Tuesday, January 16. Curated by Professor Tod Machover, “Library Music” explores the relationship between space, movement, touch and sound and ranges from musical stairs to tactile rainfall to a sonorous, robotic chandelier.

• Installations will be open to the public Tuesday-Thursday, Jan.16-18, from 2-5 pm
• Workshop-demonstration Friday, Jan.19, from 3-5 pm; refreshments
• Contact: Ariane Martins, E15-443, x3-1613, ariane@media.mit.edu
• Cosponsors: Libraries; Media Arts & Sciences

The Lewis Music Library is located at 14E-109. IAP hours begin on Jan.8 and are Monday-Friday 10am - 6pm; Saturday-Sunday 1 - 5pm.

January’s Object of the Month exhibit describes the “Harmonic Diagram” designed in 1824 by physicist and inventor Charles Wheatstone. The “diagram” is a mechanical device for explaining music theory. It is one of the items from a wide range of time periods, on diverse subjects, in many formats, in the holdings of MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collections.

Browse other exhibits for a sample of the scope of the Archives’ collections. All are welcome to visit the Archives for further exploration.

MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers, was born 202 years ago on December 7. It is appropriate, then, that the Institute Archives and Special Collections, in its December Object of the Month exhibit, announces a grant from the Fred J. Brotherton Charitible Foundation to perform conservation work on one hundred documents from the Rogers papers, one of MIT’s most important historical collections. The grant includes funds to convert the guide to the Rogers papers to EAD (Encoded Archival Description), an encoding standard for electronic archival finding aids, to make information about the collection available on the World Wide Web.