MIT Libraries News

“Riding the space shuttle is like strapping yourself to a gigantic beast….you go from 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in eight and a half minutes,” MIT alumnus, Astronaut Mike Massimino said in a talk at MIT last month.

After nearly 3 years of training, in May 2009 Massimino rocketed 5.3 million miles into space on a mission to repair NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.  The veteran astronaut spoke about the extensive preparation for the journey, as well as the risks and thrills that were a part of the historic final trip to Hubble.

He also returned an item to MIT that he took into space with him—a book loaned from the MIT Libraries’ collections.  The book, a limited edition facsimile of Galileo’s landmark publication Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), was chosen to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s astronomical research, the first recorded planetary observations using a telescope.  It is on display through December 2009 in the Science Library (14S-134).

Astronaut Massimino’s talk was sponsored by the MIT Libraries, the Technology and Policy Program (TPP)/ Engineering Systems Division (ESD), and Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The Libraries’ Bookmobile will be wheeling into Lobby 10 on Friday, November 20, 2009.  From 11a.m. until 2p.m. browse through a great selection of books, CDs, DVDs and audiobooks from the Humanities and Music Libraries.  Stop by and pick up something to enjoy over the Thanksgiving weekend!

Three open access publishers, BioMed Central, Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Beilstein-Institut, are fully cooperating with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. MIT authors do not need to provide an amendment to the publication agreements or take any other special action in order to publish with them under the MIT policy.

These publishers make their articles available under a Creative Commons license, allowing for broad reuse.

The faculty policy, established by on March 18, 2009, makes the faculty’s scholarly articles openly available on the web. Papers are being shared via MIT’s research repository, DSpace@MIT.

To submit a paper under the policy, please send the final submitted manuscript, post peer-review, but prior to the publisher’s formatting, to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or upload the paper through a short web form.

To review other confirmed publisher responses, please see: Publishers and the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. Please send any questions about publishers not yet on the page to Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Details on working with the policy

Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, x 38483

MIT GIS Services has released a new version of the MIT Geodata Repository Search Tool for ArcGIS. The MIT Geodata Repository holds 1,700+ layers of geographic data. This tool enables searching for GIS vectors and rasters via keywords, geographic location, and geometry type. For example, you can search for building footprints, like the ones used in the view of Manhattan shown above.

This tool is available in the MIT GIS Lab, and can be downloaded and installed on any machine running ESRI’s ArcGIS software. The help guide can walk one through how it works.