Back to Boston: Shadowing at MIT

After my outing to Harvard, I spent two days at MIT. There I shadowed Margret Branschofsky (known to us at UC as Margret Lippert), who now works on the DSpace project. Her job is spreading the gospel to new institutions interested in using DSpace, and encouraging departments and other "communities" at MIT to join up. She gave me a brochure that lists all the wonderful reasons why people should use DSpace. I plan to use this type of information when stimulating interest at UC Engineering in an institutional repository.

Among the compelling reasons for DSpace are a larger audience, quick distribution of research, organized access to work of department, College, etc., stable URL for future access, long-term preservation of formats. Their content consists of preprints, working papers, tech reports, data sets, simulations, images, course materials, and more.

Also during my days at MIT I visited with Steve Gass to tell him our reactions to RefWorks, which they were considering. On the 23rd I visited the Institute Archives & Special Collections to see if they had any information on Joseph B. Strauss. That they didn't have, but they did print out a list from LC's NUCMC of other archives that do have material. Stanford was one of the locations.