Dome Help

Overview

Dome was originally built in 2006 to host selected content from MIT Libraries’ special collections, visual collections, and general collections. It is a companion site to DSpace@MIT. Dome was built using the open source DSpace repository application.

Getting Started

Resources in Dome are provided for research purposes only. While descriptions of our resources are publicly-available for searching, only MIT-affiliated users can view and download the full-sized images found in the Architecture, Urban Planning, and Visual Arts and Aerial Photography collections. You must be on a computer with MIT certificates installed to view the high-resolution images. If you have questions about publication permission for images in the Perceptual Form of the City collection, please see the "Request for publication: Kepes-Lynch" form. For information about reproductions of images in the Aga Khan Visual Archive collection, please visit the Aga Khan Documentation Center research guide.

Searching Dome

Use the search box in the upper right corner of the page to perform a full-text search across all collections in Dome, or use the “See all collections” link to choose a specific collection to search in. Once you’ve done a search, you can further refine the search on the results page using filters from the drop-down list.

Search hints:

• Use Boolean operators AND OR and NOT to narrow your search
• Truncated searching using an asterisks (*) can be done in the main search box- example: searching M*net would bring up works by Monet and Manet
• You can also use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase - example: searching “Van Gogh” would bring up only works by or about the artist Vincent Van Gogh, and not other works that contain either the term Van or Gogh

Search results:

The results page displays a list of thumbnails with brief information about the work(s). If an individual work of art or architecture has more than one image in the database, each image will come up as a separate listing on the results page, and you will need to click on every record you are interested in to access the individual image shown in the thumbnail. For easier browsing of large sets of search results, change the number of results/page to a higher number (100 is the maximum).

Browsing

The browse options on the right-hand side of the page is helpful if you are not looking for a specific image, but want to see a range of images.

• Collections browses the most recent additions to a collection
• By Issue Date browses by the creation date of the work
• Creators browses the names of people and organizations associated with works
• Titles browses the list of titles in Dome
• Subjects browses the list of subject headings assigned to records in Dome
• By Type browses the objects in Dome by work type (painting, photograph, mosque, school, etc.)

Viewing an Item Record

When you click on either the hyperlinked title or on the thumbnail in the search results you will be taken an item record, which includes brief information about the item and a persistent link (URI) to the record. There is also a link to view the library metadata.

Downloading an Image

Each image in the database is available for download in two sizes, as a medium or large jpeg image. The large image is used for viewing on a computer screen, and the medium image is sized for projection. To save an image to your computer, right-click it (control-click on a Mac) and select “Save Image As.”

Copyright Concerns

If you have copyright concerns about any of the content contained within Dome, please visit this link for instructions on how to notify the MIT Libraries.

Search Dome

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