Blogs

When thinking about how researchers at Stanford might want to use the Stanford Digital Repository to support their work, probably the first scenario we envisioned was for publication support. And apparently we weren't the only ones.

Even before we started advertising the availability of the SDR for research data, Hatef Monajemi, a graduate student in the statistics department, came to us with just the problem we had envisioned.

This month marks the start of Stanford Media Preservation Lab's effort to reformat the audiovisual materials from the Benoit Mandelbrot collection. Over the course of the next month, SMPL will complete the project, making the materials available to researchers and patrons through SUL's Department of Special Collections.

"As Dr. Srinivas watched the charred fragments of his lifetime's work crumble in a fireman's hands and fall to the ground, the scholar wept."

Forty-three years later, the details of the story may be different, but a similar fate could be awaiting any researcher who lacks good data management practices. 

It was shortly after 5 am on April 24,1970, and the offices of Dr. Srinivas and nine other scholars at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford had just been firebombed.