Once each year, the international web archiving community represented by the International Internet Preservation Consortium meets for a week-long "General Assembly". As alluded to in my recap of the 2014 meeting, I'm pleased to belatedly announce that Stanford University is the confirmed host for the 2015 IIPC General Assembly as well as more promptly announce that registration is now open!
On Tuesday, Dec 16 2014, the SearchWorks team added a new set of features supporting the display and use of digital content in SearchWorks:
Four new digital collections are now available in SearchWorks. These collections take advantage of SearchWorks' ability to provide users with rich discovery and access capabilities for finding and working with digital collection content.
Bucky Conversations: Conversations on the Life and Work of an Enigmatic Genius, 2002-2003 - Collection contact: Glynn Edwards
Abstract: In 2002, to celebrate the acquisition of the Fuller archive, the Stanford University Libraries and the Stanford Humanities Laboratory launched a series of Conversations on R. Buckminster Fuller, alias "Bucky, " inventor of the Dymaxion car, the Dymaxion Dwelling Unit, and the geodesic dome, author of Utopia or Oblivion, 4D Timelock, Synergetics, Tetrascroll and Critical Path. The series consists of filmed interviews with Fuller's key collaborators, interlocutors and contemporaries, and is designed to enhance critical understanding of this enigmatic polymath.
We are pleased to announce the acceptance of our bid to join the IIPC Steering Committee, based on a vote by the IIPC membership. SUL joins the 15-member group as one of two currently-serving university library members (the other being the University of North Texas Libraries) and as the third university library to ever serve on the body (the other being the California Digital Library).
A wide range of sound recordings come to SMPL for digitization. Recently two disc recordings from the Archive of Recorded Sound’s Non-Commercial disc collection (ARS 0033) appeared in our queue: 6” duo disc blanks likely dating from the late 1940’s into the early 1950’s with recordings on one side. The discs appear to be have been recorded by a service called Santa Gram that sold semi-custom recorded greetings from Santa to children.
December 13 is a momentous date in the history of the Stanford Digital Repository. It's the date in 2012 when the very first research data item was deposited in the SDR through our online deposit application. Which makes Dec. 13, 2014, the second anniversary of this historic occasion!
Who was our first depositor, how did he find us, and what did he deposit?
As the CLIR postdoctoral fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford I work primarily with data about large collections of digitized manuscripts and fragments. For example, I have helped to make our teaching collections more easily discoverable in Searchworks. I've also been bringing together partner institutions' descriptive metadata to feed a specialized manuscript search environment.
In practice, I write code to transform batches of 70, 300, 500, or 1000+ manuscripts at a time: I've gotten very comfortable thinking of medieval manuscripts in the tens, hundreds, and even thousands. But the truth is that these large batches of digital-medieval manuscripts I curate are built of unique, single objects. Single objects that, just like the physical objects they grow from, are made by individual people, in particular environments, under specific institutional, financial, and social pressures.
In order to better understand the process that leads to the creation of a digital-medieval book, I recently followed the digitization of a fifteenth-century book of hours, Stanford University Libraries, M0379, from the request for digitization, through the slow hard work of taking the images and hours of post-production labor, to its arrival in Stanford Digital Repository (SDR).
Five years ago, University Librarian Michael Keller and University Registrar Tom Black announced the availability of the electronic thesis and dissertation submission service. Since Fall 2009, PhD and Engineering Master's students have submitted over 3,400 theses and dissertations electronically. Assistant University Registrar Reid Kallman notes, “Looking back over the past five years, the electronic thesis and dissertation submission system has been a success. In the most recent academic year we had approximately 98% of our students select the electronic submission option.”