The MIT Press and the Internet Archive have announced a partnership, with support from Arcadia, to scan, preserve, and enable libraries to lend hundreds of MIT Press books that are currently not available digitally. This partnership represents an important advance in bringing acclaimed titles across the MIT Press' publications in science, technology, art, and architecture to a global online audience.
The joint initiative is a crucial early step in Internet Archive's ambitious plans to digitise and provide public access to four million books, by partnering widely with university presses and other publishers to source print works, and enable readers to borrow the digital versions from any library that owns the physical book, as well as from archive.org.
The Internet Archive, is one of eight groups named semi-finalists in 100&Change, a global competition for a single $100 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The competition seeks bold solutions to critical problems of our time. The partnership with MIT Press is part of an ambitious plan to create more universal and equitable access to knowledge worldwide, bringing some of the most important books of the 20th century to scholars, journalists students and the print disabled.
The MIT Press - Internet Archive partnership is the MIT Press' first major digitisation endeavour. It ushers in a new era of access for readers who value the Press' distinctive position as a university press that honours real world complexity by publishing interdisciplinary scholarship that crosses traditional boundaries.
An initial group of 1,500 MIT Press titles will be scanned at Internet Archive's Boston Public Library facility, including Cyril Stanley Smith's 1980 book, From Art to Science: Seventy-Two Objects Illustrating the Nature of Discovery, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Theodora Kimball's Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, which was published in 1973. The oldest title in the group is Arthur C. Hardy's 1936 Handbook of Colorimetry.
The Internet Archive has already begun digitizing MIT Press’ backlist and anticipates lending copies as early as June 2017. The entire backlist should be available by the end of 2017.
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