Page History

DOME COLLECTIONS

Institute Archives & Special Collections

COLLECTION

MIT Annual Reports

Content

MIT Reports to the President

Size

approx. 30,000 images (40,000 pages)

Age

1865-present

Source

Institute Archives shelves and microfilm; Doc. Services server

Rights

MIT owned

Anticipated Audience

DLC's, Administration, faculty, staff, historians, legal, .  Use for historical comparisons, statistical analysis and trending

Benefits

Would help schools, departments, etc. celebrating anniversaries (e.g., we photocopied 50 years of annual reports for Sloan); researchers could get 'basic' information before visiting and focus time on archival and manuscript collections; would have been helpful to Academic Council members searching their histories to bet the basics from the comfort of their office; can find out when an office, department, lab, research or teaching effort starts or stops; narrows the time frame to enable search of administrative records.  Can find out when faculty and staff were hired, retired, promoted; major research efforts (and occasionally failures+ find out what labs and offices, etc., projects are associated with, find out the research colleagues if little is available on primary focus; useful to direct one to administrative and manuscript collections of retirements, obituaries, celebrations of milestones; facilitates research for MIT or non-MIT researchers; have been used to answer questions from researchers and top MIT administrators and would have been wonderful to be able to search electronically instead of guessing and skipping from volume to volume, skimming to find information (only to find out the answer was at an earlier or later time or under the direction of a different office); would be wonderful to answer even basic questions about tuition, attendance, or degrees over the years. A time-saver for Archives staff and anyone doing any research.  Only copies in Hayden and in Archives.

Format Risk

minimal

Format

Doc. Services has already scanned 81 years of reports (most of the reports from 1911 to 1997) approx. 400 microfiche sheets exist for all the reports from 1865 to 1995.  Reports from 1994 to present exist on-line as HTML through MIT Reference Publications Office.  see: http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/

Image Removed

Metadata

Minimal currently exists

Funding

?

Other Comments

Most important is the ability to search across years and identify the year and pages of the annual report being examined; want to be able to move pages ahead and back in same volumes once term is located; and to search across years & volumes; want to be able to have a 'search within a search'. Annual reports part of DPI (Greenstone/ContentDM) discussions a few years ago.  Also discussions in the past with MIT Reference Publications Office and Rob Wolfe re: how to move this forward (stalled in part due to complexity of searching requirements and lack of funding)