Harvesting the Low-hanging Fruit: World Wide Web Access to a Collection of MIT Theses

Harvesting the Low-hanging Fruit: World Wide Web Access to a Collection of MIT Theses

Keith Glavash

Larry Stone

Bill Comstock

Almost by accident, we have created a digital library mounting a growing retrospective collection of 4,000 MIT theses. By taking advantage of existing procedures in the MIT Libraries we are accumulating scanned images of selected theses (the low-hanging fruit), and with some freely-available software and a little development effort we put them online. Even without any active promotion on our part, it has been discovered and used by scholars all over the world, demonstrating its value as a source of knowledge. In this paper we describe this digital library and trace its evolution.

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