How Will the MIT Libraries Help to Answer Tomorrow’s Big Questions? – MIT Spectrum

Quoting Chris Bourg: "I think the fundamental role of research libraries will always be to provide enduring, abundant, equitable, and meaningful access to knowledge. Certainly, the tools and platforms for doing that will continue to evolve, as the forms by which scholars express, consume, and analyze knowledge move from static, physical forms to dynamic, interactive, networked digital forms.

In today’s environment, for example, providing access to knowledge includes having a licensed drone pilot on the MIT Libraries staff, who accompanies an EAPS [Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences] class on a research trip to Death Valley to obtain 3-D images of terrain the students could not access on foot. Another change is that modern research libraries must ensure that our collections are accessible not just to human readers, but also to text- and data-mining applications, algorithms, and machine-learning tools. And at the MIT Libraries, we are responsive to our community’s desire to interact with our content in more active, innovative, and participatory ways—through annotation, mashups, and other creative uses and reuses. This is what we mean in the Future of Libraries report when we call on MIT and the world to “hack the library.” ..."