Digital Library Blog

Who could have guessed it? Player pianos rolls, those curious scrolls of punched, now brittle and yellowed paper you might come across at the thrift store, are at the center of new research underway at – where else? -- the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

It’s back to school time! As students return to campus for the new academic year, we look back at the stream of undergraduate theses and other capstone works published in the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) by graduating students last year. As usual, it was a healthy crop! The 2019 year is particularly noteworthy due to the high number of deposited works distinguished with prizes and medals.

Last week, contributors from five institutions – Stanford University, Duke University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Princeton University – kicked off a collaborative nine-week work cycle for ArcLight. The work cycle, which runs from August 13 to October 11, 2019, will build on the ArcLight MVP implementation from 2017, and focuses on refining ArcLight’s usability and accessibility, addressing strategic needs in a community-based project. Major areas for this work cycle include:

• Usability and accessibility refinements, including potential design changes
• Revamping the tools used for indexing archival description into ArcLight’s Solr index
• Analysis and implementation supporting better integration with request management systems, digital object viewers, and more

You can follow our work on the #arclight channel on the Code4Lib Slack team or the GitHub project board for the current work cycle. We expect to release public demo videos on YouTube, and will share them on Slack as well as the arclight-community Google Group to report on our progress. The work cycle’s conclusion coincides with the 2019 Blacklight Summit, to be held in Durham, North Carolina from October 9-11.