BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is adding to its online offerings an electronic library for the already vast and mounting catalogue of scholarly materials born in digital form.
The digital library, called DSpace, initially will be managed by a federation of eight universities, including MIT. It will be available on the World Wide Web and enable data to be stored not just in text but in video and other formats.
The system runs on "open source" software that was developed in conjunction with Hewlett Packard Co. That means other institutions can use or adapt the program royalty-free to create digital libraries of their own that could easily be linked to the DSpace consortium.
"The average lifespan of a digital document is only a few years," said Ann Wolpert, director of MIT's libraries. "So the goal here is to create the capability, the persistence in...