Technology Review: MIT’s Superarchive

“Every year MIT researchers create at least 10,000 papers, data
files, images, collections of field notes, and audio and video
clips. The research often finds its way into professional journals,
but the rest of the material remains squirreled away on personal
computers, Web sites, and departmental servers. It’s accessible to
only a few right now. And with computers and software evolving
rapidly, the time is coming when files saved today will not be
accessible to anyone at all.

“Until recently there has been no overall plan to archive or
preserve such work for posterity. But true to its problem-solving
nature, MIT has come up with a solution. In September the Institute
launched DSpace, a Web-based institutional repository where faculty
and researchers can save their intellectual output and share it
with their colleagues around the world and for centuries to come.
The result of a two-year collaboration of the MIT Libraries and
Hewlett-Packard, DSpace is built on open-source software and is
available to anyone free of charge. But it’s even more important to
note that many believe this groundbreaking effort will
fundamentally change the way scholars disseminate their research
findings…”

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