February, 1998: Library 2000 has for the most part wrapped up
its activities. The project began banking its fires in the Fall of
1995, following Prof. Saltzer's retirement from full-time faculty
activity. Responsibility for the preservation of nearly 1.5 Terabytes
of scanned images, as well as the delivery of reduced-scale versions
of those images via the Internet, has been taken over by the M.I.T.
Library System, This web site remains to provide an historical record
of the work of the project.
If you are looking for research at M.I.T. related to Digital
Libraries you might find of interest an information retrieval project
named Haystack,
which Profs. David Karger and Lynn Stein are pursuing.
Library 2000 was a computer systems research project that explored the implications of large-scale on-line storage using the future electronic library as an example. The project was pragmatic, developing a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in the year 2000. Support for Library 2000 came from grants from the Digital Equipment Corporation; the IBM Corporation; ARPA, via the Corporation for National Research Initiatives; and uncommitted funds of the Laboratory for Computer Science.
One of our projects, was a joint undertaking with the M.I.T. Library System to create, along with Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and CNRI, a cooperative on-line library of scanned page-images of Computer Science technical reports. This cooperative venture was known informally as the CS-TR project. The technical reports of the participants were made available through a prototype library system developed by Library 2000, as well as through quite different prototype systems developed by some of the other participants.
For the most recent update about Library 2000, check our 1996 annual report.
There are two flashy, though not especially informative, slides, one in color and another for black and white displays, to illustrate the Library 2000 project for our ARPA sponsors. Carter Snowden of the MIT Libraries is the artist.