Want an efficient and informative way to select and organize your classes for the upcoming semester? The Course Pickr is is an interactive tool designed to help students organize their class schedules. It was developed at CSAIL by the Haystack Project, and is based on technology from Project SIMILE, a joint project of CSAIL and the MIT Libraries Digital Library Research Group (DLRG).

Students have access to course descriptions, times, locations, and data such as difficulty and units. Using a calendar, students can build schedules that allow them to see potential scheduling conflicts. The final calendars are easily printable for future reference.

Please note: this tool is in beta; consult MIT’s course catalogue for official data.

For more information, contact Amy Stout, astout@mit.edu.

Today HP and the MIT Libraries announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of organizations that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive. Jointly developed by HP and the MIT Libraries beginning in 2002, today more than 200 projects worldwide are using the software to digitally capture, preserve and share their artifacts, documents, collections and research data.

The foundation will assume responsibility for providing leadership and support to the ever growing DSpace community and promote even wider distribution and use. Michele Kimpton, formerly of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), will serve as Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation. Prior to joining DSpace, Kimpton led web-archiving technology and services at the Internet Archive where, as one of its founding directors, she initiated and managed several open source software projects to collect, access and preserve web pages from national libraries and archives.

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WHERE: 14N-132 (Digital Instruction Resource Center – DIRC)

WHEN: Friday, July 20, noon – 1pm

While you won’t come out of this session qualified to be a patent attorney, you will be able to successfully find patent references from all over the world and know how to obtain patent text and diagrams.

The session will be a hands-on practicum which will help de-mystify the patent literature and expose attendees to key resources for finding patent literature. Using patent literature is important for understanding competitive technologies and keeping abreast of current product innovations.

Feel free to bring your lunch! Drinks and dessert will be provided.

Sponsored by the MIT Libraries.

Contact the Science Library for more information.

Full schedule of JulyAP 2007 information workshops

WHERE: 14N-132 (Digital Instruction Resource Center – DIRC)

WHEN: Friday, July 13, noon – 1pm

Can you use and re-use your own work for future writing and teaching? Or is it locked tight behind a vault of copyright restrictions?

This session will help you find the keys to fully realize the potential of your own work for yourself and the world. It will provide a very brief summary of copyright law and how it affects your work, and an overview of actions you can take to improve the impact and reach of your research – including why retaining rights to your work matters, and how you can take advantage of such rights to increase citation and readership.

Feel free to bring your lunch! Drinks and dessert will be provided.

Sponsored by the MIT Libraries.

Contact the Science Library for more information.

Full schedule of JulyAP 2007 information workshops

What’s the big deal about open access anyway? If I’m writing an article, what rights should I keep? Where can I find out more?

Check out http://libraries.mit.edu/open-access to find out what’s happening nationally and beyond, and http://libraries.mit.edu/rights to find out how to retain your rights and increase the impact of your research.

Look for these posters showing current Open Access Models at the Engineering and Science Libraries (Barker, Hayden, Lindgren and Aero/Astro).

Photo of MIT’s Stata Center by Andy Ryan

A $724,415 grant from The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has been awarded to the MIT Libraries to address the challenge of preserving digital Computer-Aided Design (CAD) files.

CAD has revolutionized the architectural industry, giving architects the ability to create astounding three-dimensional models.  However CAD models exist only in proprietary digital formats that are ever-changing and short-lived, making them difficult to preserve and manage over time.  Using the designs of renowned architect Frank Gehry and his work on MIT’s Stata Center as a test bed, the FACADE (Future-proofing Architectural Computer-Aided Design) project will study CAD architectural documents and create preservation strategies to stem their potential loss.

Over the next two years the MIT Libraries’ Digital Libraries Research Group (DLRG) will work with MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning to research the primary software products (such as CATIA®, AutoCAD® and Microstation®) that produce architectural CAD models. With the guidance of former dean of the School of Architecture and Planning Bill Mitchell, the researchers will examine the role of CAD files in the life cycle of modern architecture and building construction including the entire digital and paper trail from early designs and sketches to internal communications regarding onsite revisions. They will seek strategies for long-term preservation of this material and also investigate the optimal use of digital preservation archives, such as the DSpace digital repository system, to provide open-source solutions.

Read the full article in BiblioTech (pages 8-9)
Visit the FACADE project web page

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

See the Exhibit page on Project Simile’s web site for more information.

MIT recently received a $1,500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the next phase of a project that promises to create new search technologies for digital libraries.

The project, called SIMILE, brings together researchers from the MIT Libraries Digital Library Research Group (DLRG) and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) to create next-generation search technology using Semantic Web standards–a group of standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to promote large-scale interoperability and reusability of content on the Web.

“With digital content increasing at a rapid rate; searching for, sorting through, and managing millions of digital documents is a serious challenge for today’s libraries and the libraries of tomorrow,” said MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology at MIT Libraries. Semantic Web technologies offer a way to make searching and navigating large digital libraries easier.

The new SIMILE work funded by the Mellon Foundation will focus on building software tools that can be used with large collections of digital content from the higher education and cultural heritage sectors. These will include authoring and editing tools, searching and browsing tools, tools for data management, and storage technologies to meet the needs of scholars, researcher and students. SIMILE technology will also be applied to DSpace, the open source digital archiving platform created by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard to manage and make accessible millions of digital documents including research articles and scientific databases.

DSpace is featured on a new web site devoted to educational technology innovations at MIT. The Educational Transformation through Technology at MIT site details the commitment, strategy and impact of the DSpace project and features a video interview with MIT’s Director of Libraries, Ann Wolpert, and the Libraries’ Associate Director for Technology and acting director of the DSpace project, MacKenzie Smith.

The Educause web site has made available an audio file (MP3) of an interview with MacKenzie Smith (Associate Director for Technology) about topics such as the Science Commons, governance of DSpace, the MIT Libraries’ investigation of Semantic Web technology via the SIMILE project, grid computing vis-a-vis the SDSC Storage Resource Broker, and digital preservation.

Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox Web browser that turns it into a “Semantic Web browser”, letting you make use of existing information on the Web in more useful and flexible ways. For details, see the Piggy Bank web site. See also a recent article from Lecture Notes in Computer Science by David Huynh, Stefano Mazzocchi and David Karger: Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web Inside Your Web Browser.

Interested in following what’s going on with the MIT Libraries’ research group? Check out the web site of the Digital Library Research Group for information on projects, such as CWSpace, DSRB, LEADIRS, and SIMILE. Primary concerns include building a DSpace open source community, as well as research on applications of the Semantic Web and the Data Grid to Digital Libraries and Data Curation.