Institute Archives’ records reveal that it was an accomplishment he had only dreamed about as a graduate student.  In the dedication of his PhD thesis, Aldrin wrote, “In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space this is dedicated to the crew members of this country’s present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!”

See Aldrin’s thesis in the current Fascination of Flight exhibit in the Libraries’ Maihaugen Gallery, or find it online in DSpace.

All workshops will take place in the Digital Instruction Resource Center (DIRC), 14N-132.

GeneGo Training
Wednesday, July 8, 9am – 12pm
Learn how to use this gene expression tool licensed by MIT Libraries. Bring data!
Contact: Courtney Crummett

Bioinformatics for Beginners
Thursday, July 9, 1pm – 2pm
Learn about the organization of key NCBI databases, understand the database record structure, and work with the BLAST search tool.
Contact: Howard Silver

EndNote Basics
Friday, July 10, 12pm – 1pm
Endnote is a “personal bibliographic software” package which allows you to create and manage a database of bibliographic references. Learn how to find and use information more effectively in our hands-on workshops.
Contact: Peter Cohn

OAG as a Travel Planner Tool
Monday, July 13, 12pm – 1pm
OAG Travel Planner Pro is the premier customizable online tool for business and professional travelers who need to make and manage complex travel plans.
Contact: Barbara Williams

RefWorks Basics
Friday, July 17, 12pm – 1pm
RefWorks is a web-based resource designed to help you organize references and create a bibliography. RefWorks allows you to search, retrieve relevant citations, easily cite references as you write your paper, and build your bibliography. It allows users to create individual or group accounts.
Contact: Anita Perkins

Accessing the Aero/Astro Collection
Monday, July 6 and Monday, July 20, 12pm – 1pm
Find out where Aero/Astro materials are now located. This session will highlight the various Aero/Astro collections and how to access them.
This session is limited to 25 participants. To register, contact Barbara Williams.

Sequence Alignment
Wednesday, July 22, 10am – 12pm
Explore sequence alignment algorithms and their practical applications. Session will include a hands-on algorithm exercise and practical usage information (Clustal, BLAST, BLAT, Maq).
Contact: Charlie Whittaker

DSpace@MIT for Research Collections
Friday, July 24 and Monday, July 27, 12pm – 1pm
DSpace@MIT archives and makes globally discoverable the research output of MIT faculty, researchers, and students. The session will highlight MIT Libraries’ initiatives for easy upload of complete technical report and working papers series’ and will demonstrate how individuals and research groups can establish and begin populating new collections of research materials.
Contact: Craig Thomas

BLAST
Wednesday, July 29, 11am – 12pm
Learn how to use NCBI resources and optimize your BLAST protein searches to get the most out of your results. Attendance at Bioinformatics for Beginners and familiarity with BLAST are recommended.
Contact: Amy Stout

Data Management 101
Friday, July 31, 12pm – 1pm
For researchers struggling to manage their data, basic strategies will be provided for best practices for retention and archiving, effective directory structures and naming conventions, good file formats for long-term access, data security and backup options, metadata, tagging, and citation and other relevant issues.
Contact: Anne Graham

Sponsored by the MIT Libraries.

The joined organization, named “DuraSpace,” will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms – Fedora and DSpace. DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users. DuraSpace will focus on supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission. Read full press release

DSpace was jointly developed in 2002 by Hewlett-Packard and the MIT Libraries. Today, there are more than 500 organizations worldwide using the software to manage, preserve, and share their scholarly output. MIT’s online institutional repository, DSpace at MIT, currently holds over 20,000 MIT theses and the digital works of 50 communities representing collections of MIT faculty, researchers, labs and centers.

The Perceptual Form of the City study addressed the legibility and imageability of the American city in terms of the individual’s perception of the urban landscape. The study focused on the cities of Boston, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, California, and Jersey City, New Jersey.

Records include field notes, interview transcripts, collected data, correspondence regarding the progress of the project, and hand drawn maps. See: http://libraries.mit.edu/lynch for additional information and to view a slideshow of photos from the collection.

Find a book you want in Barton, click on “Request item,” log into “Your Account” and select “office delivery” from the drop-down menu.

The book you requested will arrive at your office mailroom in 2-3 business days via campus mail.

For more information, please see our FAQ.

Vera Multi-Search – Vera had a makeover!
The new Vera Multi-Search will still help you find electronic journals, databases, and e-books, and now it will also help you search for articles within journals, conference proceedings, etc.  See the FAQ page for more information.

New LibGuides
We’ve adopted a new system of creating guides to help you find information related to your research.

PDF delivery from the Library Storage Annex
Looking for a journal article, conference proceeding, technical report or book chapter that’s in the Library Storage Annex?  Use the “Request PDF” button in the Barton catalog record to get PDF delivery to your desktop.  This service is free to members of the MIT community with an Illiad account.

Manage Your Research Data More Effectively
The Libraries have a new resource to help you in managing research data that you produce. Check out the guide to Data Management and Publishing.

Printing, Copying and Scanning Improvements
Hayden, Barker, Dewey and Rotch Libraries are moving to TechCASH with new copiers and scanners. You’ll now be able to use TechCASH (MIT ID) to pay at copiers, print for free (MIT community only) through Athena printers, and make color scans that you can email or save to your USB drive. See the Printing FAQ and the TechCASH FAQ for more information.

And coming soon…
Look for an expanded Libraries presence in Stellar including a link to the MIT Libraries Quick Start!

This advance comes as institutions such as universities, libraries, museums and research laboratories worldwide are focused on utilizing open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage digital content into the future. Making books, articles, films, music, large and small data sets, scholarly works, multi-media, learning objects and mash-ups from all parts of the globe discoverable and accessible is at the core of the DSpace and Fedora collaboration.

The collaboration is expected to benefit over 500 organizations from around the world who are currently using either DSpace (examples include MIT, Rice University, Texas Digital Library and University of Toronto) or Fedora (examples include the National Library of France, New York Public Library, Encyclopedia of Chicago and eSciDoc) open source software to create repositories for a wide variety of purposes. Read more…

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

WHEN: Friday, July 25, noon – 1pm

Geared for graduate students, this workshop addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.

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

Sponsored by the MIT Libraries.

Contact Ellen Duranceau for more information.

Full schedule of JulyAP 2008 information workshops

Read about MIT Libraries’ news in the latest issue of BiblioTech.  In this issue:

• From the Director–a column by Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries
• New Technologies–an article about the Libraries’ beta projects
• From the Archives–a column by Tom Rosko, Head of the Institute Archives & Special Collections
• Supporting the Libraries–news about recent gifts to the Libraries
• DSpace Community Grows–an article about the newly formed DSpace Foundation
• Saving Endangered Languages–an article about preserving the work of late MIT linguistics professor Kenneth Hale

Get a PDF copy of BiblioTech or subscribe by emailing your name and address to dev-lib@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.

See full story

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

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.

Each month the Archives exhibits an “object” to illustrate the richness and variety of its collections and invite their further exploration. A poster is displayed in the exhibit case opposite Room 14N-118 (and the following month in the Libraries’ kiosk at the Stata Center), and a version is created for the Web. Browsing the exhibits at http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/exhibits-object.html may whet your appetite for more information about MIT’s history and the extraordinary men and women who are a part of that history.

To find theses in DSpace, go to: http://libraries.mit.edu/mit-theses. Current MIT students, faculty and staff are able to print PDF files of theses (certificates required). Non-MIT users have access to a readable copy and are given the option of purchasing printable files.

The 11,000 theses in DSpace represent a small portion of the over 100,000 theses found in the collection. The full collection of paper theses dating from 1868 can be found in the Institute Archives. More theses will be added to DSpace as they are scanned on demand or submitted electronically. Recent MIT graduates or students about to complete their degree may submit an electronic version of their theses directly to DSpace: http://web.mit.edu/etheses.

The latest set of installation and technical documentation is also available.