As Northeastern University’s community continues to expand, the library strives to provide equitable access to our resources, maintaining an e-preferred collections policy. For items outside of our collections, interlibrary loan is integral—and this service includes borrowing e-books whenever possible.
In 2023, representatives from 11 member institutions within the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) formed the eBook Sharing Working Group. I was proud to co-chair the group with Marc Hoffeditz, Resource Sharing Manager of the BLC. Pamela Diaz, Northeastern’s Resource Sharing Lending Coordinator, was also a member. Our charges were:
Investigating a vendor-neutral, consortial approach to e-book borrowing and lending.
Crafting documentation to detail e-book borrowing and lending procedures, including license negotiations, holding considerations, system alterations, and adaptable workflows.
Exploring potential avenues for consortial e-book sharing, advocacy, and group acquisitions.
Northeastern University Library’s institutional repository, the Digital Repository Service, is celebrating 10 years of caring for the university’s scholarly, archival, and administrative high-value materials. From day one, the mission of the DRS has been to provide a long-term, sustainable home for the born digital and digitized content being produced by members of the Northeastern community.
More than just a technical system, the DRS is a service provided by the library to help solve a common problem for faculty, staff, students, researchers, and project teams: where can I store the digital output from my work? The DRS allows these projects developed at Northeastern to be maintained and shared with a wider audience. In addition to maintaining the DRS system, services provided by DRS staff include running training sessions, answering questions, consulting, and depositing files for users.
Originally developed as a prototype in 2011, the system was created by a library team — three developers, the repository manager, a Northeastern co-op, and a library administrator — with the goal of constructing a completely realized system ready for production. The first version was ready to be used fully by the Northeastern community in June 2015.
The DRS was launched with some rough edges, which were slowly smoothed into the system users are familiar with today. We have received tremendous response from users about the usefulness of the system, as well as thoughtful and constructive feedback about how the system can be improved (e.g. faster page load times, better search functionality, and more control over files, among others).
The DRS, as it appeared in 2015.
We have done our best to grow with the university community as its needs shift by increasing support for datasets, loading large batches of files on behalf of users and project teams, and tripling our original storage capacity, but there is always more to be done to meet the needs of our users.
The shape of the content stored in the DRS has shifted over the years, as well. Initially just for theses and dissertations, university photographs, and archival material, the DRS now fully supports various types of project materials for digital humanities research, datasets for researchers in various disciplines, oral histories, and many others.
Since its launch, DRS content has been viewed, downloaded, or streamed more than 1.1 million times, and we’ve had more than 13,000 members of the Northeastern community sign into the system. The DRS averages approximately 2,000 unique visitors and 4,000 views, downloads, and streams a day.
The DRS provides a home for and access to research and projects by members of the Northeastern community.
The success of the system can be attributed to the combined efforts of staff in many library departments, including development and system administration from Library Technology Services and Digital Infrastructures; outreach and faculty support from Research and Instruction; data management support from Research Data Services; issue triage and metadata collaboration with Resource and Discovery Services; and continual support and advocacy from library administration. And, of course, Digital Production Services, the department primarily responsible for maintaining the system and supporting the service through digital production, metadata maintenance, and user support.
The DRS is not the first system of its kind supported by the library. It adopted its first repository system in the early 2000s, followed by IRis in 2007. The library’s commitment to maintaining the scholarly output of the university was formed during those early years, a commitment we have refined and strengthened over the more than 20 years of dedicated support for faculty, staff, and students working to help fulfill the university’s mission. It’s been a great pleasure to support the Northeastern community in this way, and we look forward to the next 10 years and beyond.
Processing assistants Julia Lee and Aleks Renerts recently went through more than 150 boxes of papers belonging to transportation and infrastructure leader Frederick Salvucci. Salvucci’s contributions to infrastructure are numerous: you can become familiar with the scope of his impact by reading his Wikipedia page and listening to his oral history with Head of Archives and Special Collections and University Archivist Giordana Mecagni. The papers he donated to Northeastern encompass his time at MIT, where he has taught since the late 1970s, and document infrastructure projects students were involved in and that he advised on throughout the world.
With the goal of improving access to these records for researchers, Julia and Aleks went through each box carefully, refoldering materials and assigning descriptive keywords. They have selected a few items from the collection to highlight.
“The Inner Belt” Belt
This commemorative wearable belt is a pun referencing the Inner Belt project. The Inner Belt was a proposed eight-lane highway that would have connected I-93 to I-90 and I-95, stretching from Somerville through Cambridge, across the Boston University Bridge, and through Boston and Roxbury. Plans for the highway would have placed major intersections along its length, disrupting the landscape of many of the neighborhoods of Greater Boston. In the late 1960s and ’70s, construction of the highway was blocked by the actions of a group of city planners, community activists, universities, and politicians, including Salvucci. The defeat of the Inner Belt project marks a significant moment in the history of Boston, transportation in the city, and its history of urban development, as well as setting the tone for Salvucci’s career and focus on the role of community in transportation.
MIT Commencement Exercises
Salvucci taught at MIT as a senior lecturer from 1978-1983 and from 1991 to the present. He has taught courses on transportation and urban planning through the Department of Civil Engineering and worked for MIT’s Center for Transportation Studies (now the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics). Salvucci’s students were conscious of his impact in the field. Comments on his teaching from the Spring 1991 term repeatedly emphasized his knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for the material. His ability to give students insight into the “real world” of transportation and civil engineering was praised, and my personal favorite comment creates a delightfully succinct picture of the Salvucci classroom experience: “Great war stories with great analysis.”
Tren Urbano Encuentro Reports
The MIT/UPR Encuentro Reports represent the nine-year partnership between the MIT Transit Lab, the Puerto Rican Transportation Authority, and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). From the 1990s to the 2000s, MIT students, overseen by Salvucci, collaborated with students from UPR to “study and advise on the design, operation, and scheduling of the Tren Urbano rail system.” The encuentro (meeting) reports demonstrate the specific concerns and strategies relevant to the Tren Urbano project and showcase student contributions over several years of consultation. This collaborative project formed the model for future partnerships between MIT and various transit authorities around the world, many of which are also well-represented in Salvucci’s work and papers.
Statement of Strategy, London Transport
Boston was not the only city to benefit from Salvucci’s knowledge. Through MIT, he worked with Transport for London (TfL), the government body in charge of most of London’s transportation network, on their Crossrail project. Crossrail, as its name suggests, involved the creation of a new east-west rail line through London with connections to existing major train routes in the UK. Today, it is known as the Elizabeth Line, as Crossrail was the name specific to the construction project. Salvucci’s papers at Northeastern include correspondence and reports from his involvement with TfL that document both Crossrail and the beginnings of London’s Oyster card fare system. I’m personally appreciative of Salvucci’s work in London, as it was the Elizabeth Line that got me to and from Heathrow Airport during a recent trip to the UK.
To learn more about accessing the Frederick Salvucci papers, email the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.
Julia Lee (she/her) is in her first year of the Simmons University Library and Information Science graduate program. She received her BA from Northeastern University with a combined major in English and theatre.
Aleks Renerts (he/him) recently completed a dual MA degree in history and library and information science, with a concentration in archives management, from Simmons University. He received his BA in history from McGill University.
Two recently processed collections document the organizing power of everyday Bostonians who fought development proposals that would have negatively impacted their neighborhoods.
Roxbury Tenants of Harvard records (Jeane Neville)
The Tenants’ View newsletter, May 7, 1970. Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections
The Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (RTH) formed in 1969 to oppose Harvard University’s proposed expansion into the Mission Hill neighborhood, which would have displaced residents. RTH was successful in pressuring Harvard to build a relocation housing development instead of a teaching hospital complex.
The RTH collection captures the unfolding of events, and the negotiations between RTH and Harvard University, over the course of the 1960s and ’70s through meeting minutes and agendas, notes, reports, flyers, canvas sheets, writings, correspondence, and media coverage. Jeane Neville, a Radcliffe student in the late ’60s, became involved in organizing the Mission Hill residents; these records were retained by her and donated to the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections by her brother Padraic Neville after her death.
To learn more about the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records, explore the finding aid.
Ken Kruckemeyer papers
Cover illustration by D. Chandler Jr. of bilingual “Stop Turnpikes Over People” informational resource, undated. Ken Kruckemeyer papers, Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections
An architect by training, Ken Kruckemeyer began organizing around issues such as transit and housing in the 1960s after moving to the South End. He soon became involved in the local anti-highway movement of that period. His papers document anti-highway activism, as well as activism around Tent City and Melnea Cass Boulevard. They also document the planning, environmental impact studies, and construction of the Southwest Corridor Project, for which Kruckemeyer served as project manager.
Explore meeting materials, reports, studies, notes, correspondence, newsletters, flyers, and more in Kruckemeyer’s papers. To learn more about what’s in the collection, check out the finding aid.
To access the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard (Jeane Neville) records or the Ken Kruckemeyer papers, email Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.
One of my recent projects was to digitize the very first issues of Tastemakers, Northeastern’s student-run music magazine, which began in 2007 and is still running today. Since the 2010-11 academic year, all issues were created in a born-digital format, so they were easy to add to the Digital Repository Service earlier this year. However, the first 19 issues were not, so it was my job to scan them on our Bookeye scanner and turn them into PDFs ready to be made accessible.
Since the issues in question date from 2007 to mid-2010, they fall exactly in the transitional moment of the music industry when legal streaming was still a novel concept, but CDs had fallen largely out of fashion in favor of iPods and other portable mp3 players. Consequently, as I was going through the magazines, I found an assortment of pieces that are retrospectively funny because we, in 2024, know the outcomes of all their speculations (most of which didn’t happen).
The articles I found fell into two broad categories: devices and streaming, both of which provide an interesting (as well as amusing) look at the future we imagined music would have at that time.
Let’s start with devices. The two pieces I found are on the potentiality of USB sticks and microSD cards as the dominant form of physical media to replace CDs. The USB article discusses a few bands and artists circa 2008, including Matchbox Twenty and Jennifer Lopez, who released albums on USB sticks embedded in rubber bracelets, primarily as a marketing gimmick. The author wonders whether if the technology will catch on in earnest or remain a ploy. At the time, vinyl was already starting to make a resurgence as the go-to medium for people who want their music on a physical object, and that group is comprised primarily of people who care deeply about the auditory and visual technical details of their music. So, I think the bracelets were never really going to work, since a group of mp3 files on a rubber bracelet couldn’t match up to either the quality or experience of vinyl on a record player, and thus eliminated their theoretical primary market. (It’s also funny to imagine collectors’ storage for a bunch of rubber bracelets. Would you keep them in a basket? Individual cases? One of those divider boxes for sorting hardware? On a pegboard on your wall?)
Meanwhile, the microSD card piece talks about an attempt in late 2008 by major record labels to supplant (or at least supplement) CDs with pre-loaded microSD cards, branding as slotMusic, that can go into any phone or mp3 player with a corresponding card slot. This one is interesting because it could have possibly been successful, but only in a universe where Apple wasn’t already the dominant force in the portable music player market. iPods were well established as everyone’s favorite internet-based mp3 player, and the iPhone was already becoming the most popular phone, which combined the two via a built-in iTunes app and completely removed the need to even have a separate device for music. Even if they had managed to carve out a market around Apple, rapid increases in storage capacity would have also rendered them useless within a handful of years. While 1GB was a significant amount of storage for the size of a microSD in 2008, 128GB microSDs were introduced in 2014, which is a 127,000% increase in about five years. They didn’t stop there. Today, microSD cards are available in sizes up to 1TB, which is big enough to fit 1,000 slotMusic cards on a single item. So, slotMusic never really stood a chance.
Now, on to streaming. Over the course of three years, Tastemakers published five different pieces about then-current and upcoming streaming services, effectively culminating (though not knowingly at the time) in a piece about the European launch of Spotify. Nearly all of the platforms mentioned are now entirely defunct, with some exceptions including Spotify and Amazon mp3 (now Amazon Music). The other remaining platforms now provide internet radio and recommendation sites, rather than streaming music, a fact that does not seem coincidental. Here’s a breakdown:
It’s also amusing now to think of Spotify as the hip new platform from Europe. Their article quotes other American journalists who had received early-access press accounts describing Spotify as “the world’s biggest iTunes collection” and “an almost infinite jukebox.” It sounds quaint in today’s world, but then you can’t describe something with words that don’t yet exist. Reading their predictions from 2009 about whether Spotify will be successful while others failed is like listening to someone try to predict the ending of a TV show that you’ve already finished.
I sat for about 30 minutes trying to think of something to speculate for the future the way that these articles speculated about streaming. The conclusion I came to is that I don’t think there are any more technological advancements that music needs to make; you can get a device that fits in your pocket with up to 1TB of space and provides access to anything on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube. Either that, or, like the writes of Tastemakers in 2007-2010, I cannot even conceive of what is yet to come, exactly because it has not come yet.
