WHAT:  SLA Virtual Seminar - Initiatives for Change: Digital Access, Sharing & Intellectual Property.  The speaker will be MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology at the MIT Libraries.  Ms. Smith 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.

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.