HP and MIT Partner on Digital Library Project

Information Today, May, 2000

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have announced a $1.8 million joint project to build a digital archive at MIT that could serve as a model for other universities. The archive will be capable of holding the approximately 10,000 articles produced by MIT authors annually, including a large amount of multimedia content. In addition to establishing its own research team at MIT, HP Labs will provide the university with $1.8 million for the 2-year project to cover staff, equipment, and space. The system is expected to begin accepting submissions late next year.

"Information technology is transforming higher education," said MIT Provost Robert A. Brown. "This project will give MIT and other research universities the tools they need to capture the digital output of their institutions, just as they have with print."

"The purpose of this project is to develop a scalable digital archive with storage, submission, retrieval, searching, access control, rights management, and publishing capabilities," said Ann Wolpert, director of the MIT Libraries. "As MIT's intellectual heritage makes its way into electronic form, the library must take responsibility for capturing those documents that will form the foundation of tomorrow's scholarship."

"This digital archive will be designed in such a way that the underlying software, data models, and methods can be shared freely with other academic institutions," said Dick Lampman, HP vice president of research and director of HP Labs. "Eventually, the project could be adopted by other research universities worldwide."

The project will include articles written by faculty and researchers, technical reports from MIT labs and centers, and other electronic content deemed valuable by the MIT Libraries or its partners among the schools, labs, and centers at the university. The electronic formats will include text, images, audio, video, and datasets.

"The digital archive will supplement, rather than replace, commercial publication by the MIT community," said Eric Celeste, assistant director for technology planning and administration for MIT Libraries. "The archive will capture pre-print versions of documents destined for publication elsewhere, as well as supporting data and images that would otherwise not be shared with the scholarly community."

"Some people may believe that the Web already captures this content, particularly in the academic arena," said Bill Wickes, HP Labs manager for the MIT Libraries project. "But enhancements to the system are needed to ensure the integrity, flexibility, and long-term value of the data."

The project is designed to supply seven specific services that are not usually provided by the Web: stable, long-term storage; support for formats beyond HTML; access control; rights management; versioning; community feedback; and flexible publishing capabilities. That means a scholar submitting his or her work would know that it would be available for future colleagues in various formats, protected by access control and rights management, linked to earlier and later versions of itself, and capable of attracting feedback.

Source: Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, CA, 650/857-7277; http://www.hp.com.