[MNASIS-L] Interested in the October 20th SLA Virtual Seminar: Initiatives for change?

[Janet M. Arth]

If you are interested in attending this seminar, please let Jim Tchobanoff 
know by Wednesday, October 13th.  Based on the level of interest, we will 
offer the seminar at one or more locations.  Information about the seminar 
is at the end of this note.

Anticipated costs are $10 for SLA/ASIST members and $15 for non-members.

Once we know the level of interest and availability of meeting facilities, 
a second note will be sent out with registration information.

Jim Tchobanoff
jtchobanoff at bigfoot.com


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Initiatives for Change: Digital Access, Sharing & Intellectual Property

October 20, 2004
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm ET

MacKenzie Smith is the Associate Director for Technology at the MIT 
Libraries where she oversees the Libraries' use of technology and its 
digital library research program. She is currently acting as the project 
director for DSpace, MIT's collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Labs to 
develop an open source Institutional Repository for scholarly research 
material in digital formats. She was formerly the Digital Library Program 
Manager in the Harvard University Library's Office for Information Systems 
where she managed the design and implementation of the Library Digital 
Initiative there, and has also held positions in the library IT departments 
at Harvard and the University of Chicago. Her background and research 
interests are in applied technology in libraries and academia, and digital 
libraries in particular.
Description

Over the past several years MIT has embarked on a number of high-profile 
projects that address issues of intellectual property in an academic 
context. DSpace, the MIT Libraries digital repository system, was created 
to capture the intellectual output of MIT faculty's research and teaching, 
both for immediate networked access and long-term preservation. DSpace is 
free, open source software that is being adopted by many other institutions 
world wide to build a federation of intellectual assets that achieves a 
virtual library of enormous scholarly value.

OpenCourseWare is another initiative to digitize and distribute on the Web, 
for free, all of MIT's course materials. The Open Knowledge Initiative and 
its successor, SAKAI, are developing free, open source course management 
and other educational software applications over a standard 
interoperability framework for academic enterprise computing applications.

MIT faculty and librarians are closely involved in the Creative Commons, 
which seeks to offer authors alternatives to standard copyright protection 
for their creations, as well as the Budapest Open Access Initiative and 
similar efforts to inform scholars of the value of providing free and open 
access to their scholarship instead of relying on expensive commercial 
journals for the distribution of their work. Put this all together and you 
have a picture of an institution that is taking on the forces of commerce 
around intellectual property in a significant way, without damaging its 
institutional financial base or other best interests. With these 
initiatives MIT is setting an example of what can be accomplished by active 
experimentation and public opposition to current trends in intellectual 
property rights, to protect the world of creativity, scholarship, and 
academia from the encroaching forces of intellectual property commerce.

This seminar will stimulate many ideas for initiating change in your 
environment!