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DOME COLLECTIONS - ESL p. 1

Digitizing David Taylor Model Basin Technical Reports

Content

MIT holds a number of unique and rare technical report series. Among them is the series of reports from the David Taylor Model Basin. MIT has one of the largest collections of these reports; Linda Hall Library may be able to fill in gaps in MIT holdings. The David Taylor Model Basin is one of the largest ship model basins — test facilities for the development of ship design — in the world. David Watson Taylor designed and supervised construction in 1896 of the Washington Navy Yard's Experimental Model Basin (EMB). The Basin named for him was built in 1939 in Bethesda, Maryland and contains a shallow water basin, a deep water basin, and a high-speed basin. The David Taylor Model Basin is currently operated as a field activity of the Carderock Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center.  For more information, see http://files.asme.org/ASMEORG/Communities/History/Landmarks/5528.pdf.

Size

several thousand individual reports.

Age

20-70 years <?>

Source

MIT collections in Barker Library( a few titles are at LSA)

Rights

Public domain (federally funded reports), some produced at MIT. 

Anticipated Audience

Engineers interested in hydrodynamics, structural design, and ocean engineering, including ocean, civil, and aeronautical engineers.

Benefits

The primary benefit would be improved access to these reports both at MIT and beyond. The secondary benefit would be to provide experience at MIT with technical report digitization standards and practices. We would follow practices pioneered by TRAIL, Technical Report Archive and Image Library, led by The Greater Western Library Alliance and the Center for Research Libraries. This is a pilot project to digitize federal technical reports published before 1975.  This experience will be valuable because MIT Libraries have other, significant collections of technical reports, both academic and federal, in print and microformats.  Such legacy collections are often difficult to identify and use and present challenges related not only to format but complexity or obscurity of retrieval. An MIT initiative following TRAIL practices could provide valuable experience in creating local collections that are also available through federated or collaborative services. (TRAIL ref: http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/

Format Risk

Some.  Paper and binding are at some risk.

Format

Paper (possibly small number in microfiche)

Metadata

Barker reports are being cataloged, and a small number of MARC records are available for these reports.  MARC records may be available for others via OCLC.

ESL Contact(s)

Anne Graham, Carol Robinson

Funding

IMLS?