MIT Libraries News

IAP Rotch Library Film Series:

• WHEN: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, January 7, 2008 through February 1, 2008

•  WHERE: showing in 7-134A (Rotch Library conference room; enter via 7-238)

• Hosted by Ann Whiteside, Jolene deVerges, Jennifer Friedman, and Heather McCann

Did you know that Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning maintains an impressive DVD collection, with new titles added regularly? Join the library staff as we explore the scope of the collection. Each week of IAP, we will highlight a different theme in the collection, including video art, architecture and urban development & planning. Brief, informal discussion will follow each each day’s films.

Rotch Library Film Series, Week 1

The Rotch Library is proud to present the IAP Film Series, held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the month of January. The week of January 7 is Video Art Week!

Films will be shown in the Rotch Library Conference Room starting at 11:30AM and ending no later than 2PM. The schedule for the upcoming week will be:

Monday, January 7

• Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart
• William Kentridge: Art from Ashes

Wednesday, January 9

• Expressing the Inexpressible: Shirin Neshat
• The Body as Matrix: Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle”

Friday, January 11

• HC Gilje: Cityscapes
• Gary Hill: Transcending the Senses

The week of January 14 is Urban Planning Week!

Please forward this information to interested parties!

If you have any questions, please contact Heather McCann at (617) 253-7098 / hmccann@mit.edu OR Jennifer Friedman (617) 258-5595 / jrfried@mit.edu.

Are you wondering what an RSS feed is and how it can help your research?

Want to learn more about using GIS, EndNote or RefWorks?

Need to find chemical information, energy information, social science data, or patents?

Want to learn how to marble paper, improve your photography, or how to compost with worms?

Look no further! Take a peek at all of the MIT Libraries IAP Activities offered in 2008.

Our ever-expanding collection of classics and independent films are now more prominently located in our Browsery area.  Stop by the Humanities Library and check ‘em out.

Lanai: Living in the Landscape, a photo book by graduate student Stephanie Hsu (M.Arch), will be on display in Rotch Library (Rm 7-238), from December 10, 2007 through January 13, 2008. Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

Once the largest pineapple plantation in the world, the island of Lanai is now 98% privately owned, home to two Four Seasons resorts, and known as the most exclusive of the Hawaiian Islands. Revealing life on Lanai from the perspective of the local population, architecture graduate student Stephanie Hsu documents the island during its transition from a plantation to a world class vacation destination.

This hands-on workshop will help graduate students learn tools that measure journal quality, publisher copyright policies, and their significance to you as an author. Includes concise overviews of:

• Measures of journal quality, including ISI impact factor and other indicators
• Copyright law as related to journal publishing (transferring copyright)
• Publisher copyright policies, including rights for posting your work on the web
• Publishing options: open access channels, in both new and traditional journals, and other types of publishing

When: Friday November 16, 2007, 11am-12pm
Where: 14N-132
Presented by: Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing  & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries, efinnie@mit.edu
Sponsored by: The GSC-ARC and the MIT Libraries

Today we’re making available to the MIT community a beta release of a new version of Vera, called Vera Multi-Search.

http://libraries.mit.edu/vera-beta (MIT only)

This version of Vera adds the ability to simultaneously search several databases at once, such as Web of Science, Proquest Research Library, and Barton: MIT Libraries’ Catalog.

It’s designed to help you start your library research more quickly by showing you which databases have the most hits for your query and displaying the merged results, so that you don’t have to search each database separately.

The old Vera (which lists our all of our databases and e-journals) is still available to use during the beta period. We’re offering an early look at the new Vera while we’re still developing it, so that we can get feedback from the MIT community and conduct usability tests.

To volunteer to particpate in usability tests, or to send feedback and comments, email: webmaster@libraries.mit.edu.

Place, Sense, Time: The Summer 2007 Veneto Experience
by Najiyah Edun, Shun Kanda, and Mio Uchida
October 22nd - November 16th, 2007, in Rotch Library

‘Space is real for it seems to affect my senses long before my reason. The materiality of my body both coincides with and struggles with the materiality of space. My body carries in itself spatial properties, and spatial determinations…unfolding against the projections of reason, against the absolute Truth’

-Bernard Tschumi

The exhibit aims to present the investigations, journeys and discoveries of eleven students in the Veneto Experience Program during the summer of 2007. The program is month-long architecture course that immerses students in the city of Venice and in the work of Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), focusing on the intricate and profound relationship between the life-work of Venetian architect and Venice, each embodied in the other.

The exhibit purports to express and embody the heightened visual, acoustic and tactile senses that are stirred by Venice and by Scarpa’s work. It aims to stimulate and enhance visitors’ awareness of their bodily movements in space, enabling people to uncover and rediscover how our body reacts to space and how space and the senses can promote an enhanced perception of the body.

Please join authors@mit in welcoming Professor Irving Singer, as he speaks on his new book, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher, just published by The MIT Press.

Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman’s artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman’s filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman’s output was not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense.  

Irving Singer is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He is the author of Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique, Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir (both published by The MIT Press), and many other books. 

Where: The MIT Humanities Library Reading Room (14S-200)

When: Thursday November 15th, 6:00pm

The event is free and wheelchair accessible. 

For more information, call call 253-5249, or email authors@mit.edu.  See the MIT Press Bookstore’s “Events” page for a list of upcoming events.

Due to scheduled drilling activity in the Hermann building related to the Building E62 construction project, Dewey Library will be closed Wednesday, November 21st through Saturday, November 24th. Dewey will resume normal operating hours on Sunday, November 25th at 1pm.

Other MIT Libraries will be open reduced hours on November 21st and are scheduled to close on Nov. 22nd and 23rd due to the Thanksgiving Holiday. See the Complete MIT Libraries’ fall holiday hours.

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions or concerns about access to Dewey’s resources or staff during this period, please contact Millicent Gaskell, Head Librarian, Dewey Library, at mrg@mit.edu or 3-5619.

Fall GIS Lab workshops

This class will introduce a variety of commonly used GIS tools, including learning to create and edit your own data, incorporate paper maps into a GIS (georeference), map tabular information (addresses and xy data - for example, from a GPS unit), change the projection of your data, calculate the straight line distance between points, create contour lines from a digital elevation model (DEM), and use ArcScene to visualize data in 3D. It is recommended for users to have done the Introduction to GIS exercise or have some previous experience with ArcGIS before attending this workshop.

This new hands-on class will provide a comprehensive introduction to estimating the linear regression model using ordinary least squares in Stata. Topics covered include: multiple regression, dummy variables, interaction effects, hypothesis tests, and model diagnostics. In addition, instructors will explain the substantive interpretation of regression outputs. Taught by the Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC) Statistical Consultant.

Prerequisites: General familiarity with Stata, including importing and managing datasets and data exploration. Familiarity with the linear regression model and ordinary least squares estimation. Students currently enrolled in a graduate-level introduction to statistics class that covers regression also are eligible.

When: Wednesday, November 7th, 12-2pm

Where: E53-220

Space is limited. To register, contact: Katherine McNeill-Harman, mcneillh@mit.edu.

Need to find news articles for your research? Want to scan today’s headlines and top stories? The Libraries provide an array of sources that can help:

General News:

• Browse current and recent editions of major papers with Factiva. Use the U.S. Newsstand to read today’s New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, plus recent issues of Newsweek and other magazines. For more newspapers, select Business Newsstand (under Group Pages), which includes the Boston Globe and Financial Times.
• LexisNexis Academic covers major U.S. and world publications, wire services and transcripts of broadcasts. Use the initial search screen to see recent major stories or use the News tab to select from a list of sources.

Television News: The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a huge collection of network TV news broadcasts. Users can search or browse by date.

Foreign Language News:

• Use World News Connection to monitor developments in any country or region. Articles are added daily from thousands of non-U.S. news sources and are provided in English translation.
• If you read other languages, check out the Libraries’ guide to Foreign Language News and Newspapers.

Environmental and Energy News: Greenwire has daily coverage of environmental and energy issues at the national and state level from sources in all types of media.

Ethnic News: Check Ethnic NewsWatch for articles from hundreds of newspapers and magazines of the ethnic, minority and native press.

Fall GIS Lab workshops

Location: MIT GIS lab, Rotch Library (7-238)

The US Census holds an enormous amount of demographic information dating back to 1790. New and interesting relationships can often times be observed when looking at census data on a map. Come learn about what’s in the US Census and the tools available for mapping it.

Need a good read?  Want to watch a DVD, or listen to an audiobook?  The Humanities Library has fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, manga, travel guides, DVDs, and popular magazines to help you kick back and relax after your last problem set of the day.

Fall GIS Lab workshops

Learn to read the contour lines on a topographic map and how to use a digital elevation model to do hydrographic analysis.

Fall GIS Lab workshops

Learn about GIS, and the basics of using ArcGIS, a powerful desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) available at MIT. Learn to work with data from the MIT Geodata Repository, analyze the data and create maps that can be used in reports and presentations.

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

Consulting: Interested in one-on-one help with statistical analysis and software? The Harvard-MIT Data Center (HMDC) Statistical Consultant can help you via email or an in-person consultation. Contact her via our email form.

Workshops: Interested in learning statistical analysis software? Get an introduction to Stata, the package used in many departments at MIT. With hands-on exercises, learn how to import and manage datasets. Taught by the HMDC Statistical Consultant. Novices welcome!

When: two repeat sessions, attend either one of the following:

• Tuesday, October 2nd, 12-2pm or
• Friday, October 5th, 12-2pm

Where: E53-220, Dewey Library

Space is limited. To register, contact: Katherine McNeill-Harman, mcneillh@mit.edu.

Fall GIS Lab workshops

This session will be offered twice: Friday, September 21 & Friday, October 19

Location: MIT GIS lab, Rotch Library (7-238)

The US Census holds an enormous amount of demographic information dating back to 1790. New and interesting relationships can often times be observed when looking at census data on a map. Come learn about what’s in the US Census and the tools available for mapping it.