MIT Libraries teams with HP on digital archive

MIT Libraries on Tuesday announced a $1.8 million joint project with Hewlett-Packard Co., to build a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The archive, which is expected to begin accepting submissions late next year, will be capable of holding the nearly 10,000 articles produced by MIT authors each year, including multimedia content. HP will establish its own research team at the school, and provide MIT with $1.8 million over two years for staff, equipment and space.

"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," MIT Provost Robert Brown said in a release.

The project will include articles written by faculty and staff, technical reports from MIT labs and centers, and other electronic content deemed valuable by MIT Libraries (libraries.mit.edu). The electronic formats will include text, images, audio, video and data sets.

The archive is designed to provide seven services that are not usually provided by the World Wide Web: stable, long-term storage; support for formats besides HTML; access control; rights management; versioning; community feedback; and flexible publishing capabilities.

"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 "preprint' versions of documents destined for publication elsewhere, as well as supporting data and images that would otherwise not be shared with the scholarly community."