The Stanford University Archives is pleased to announce the acquisition of a small collection of ephemera documenting President Benjamin Harrison's epic 1891 cross-country railroad journey through nineteen states. The journey covered nearly 10,000 miles, during which time the President made nearly 150 speeches, which were later published in a volume compiled by a correspondent from the New York Mail and Express who accompanied the President's party.
Since its inception in the early 1970s, email has become a durable form of communication – one that presents a massive problem for donors, repositories, and researchers. Over 140 billion email messages are sent every day, and many, if not all have research value as part of an archival collection. Email is used for more than just communication. It is used for collaboration, planning, sharing, conducting transactions, and as an aid to memory – a self-archive. It documents relationships – personal, business, and communal. Our reliance on and daily use of email over the past 40 years has developed rich archival material with a secondary benefit of recording social networks in the header information of senders and recipients.
The Department of Special Collections at SUL proposes to address important facets of stewarding email archives that have not been tackled in previous projects. Characteristics of email such as its relatively stable format standardization as well as the inherent structure itself – header, body, attachments – make email an ideal candidate for automated tools to support archival workflows, such as appraisal and processing, as well as benefitting the user through discovery and delivery.
We are excited to announce that 187 posters from the STOP AIDS Project records have been digitized, accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository and are now available online via the collection's finding aid.
Over the past two years, the Digital Library Systems and Services department at SUL has developed a user-centered approach to building websites. Our methodology involves early and iterative feedback from the primary audience of SUL’s web resources – academic researchers. The intended result is web applications that help users achieve their research goals while at the same time increasing the efficiency of the software development process (thus, lowering the time to development and the cost).
Academic Charts Online: International Popular Music (ACO:IPM)
[March 2015 update: site renamed Music Industry Data]
ACO is a new subscription database which includes over 60 years of popular music charts from the Americas, Europe and some Asian territories. Data is provided by Billboard, The Official Charts Company, Aria Charts and other similar sources.
This is the second blog post from Stanford Media Preservation Lab in our series documenting our progress as we refurbish our ½” reel-to-reel videotape machine. When we left off, we had given our Sony AV-3650 a good cleaning and re-lubricated most of the mechanical workings of the tape transport.
The goal for these next sessions was to remove the old jacks from the machine’s connector panel and replace them with modern jacks that wouldn’t require adapters and could be used with our newer equipment in the video lab. Although the connectors were still functional, they were old and worn from use.
"The Beethoven Project is a large-scale celebration acknowledging Bing Concert Hall as the new home of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra and Stanford Philharmonia Orchestra. These ensembles, under the baton of Jindong Cai, will devote the season to the performance of all nine Beethoven symphonies, as well as all five of the composer’s piano concerti featuring Van Cliburn Gold Medal–winning pianist and Stanford alumnus Jon Nakamatsu.
Although much of our time at SMPL is spent digitizing and working with library collections, part of our work involves seeking out legacy equipment that can be refurbished and installed in our labs for use in our reformatting work. In 2011, we were fortunate to find a working ½” EIAJ reel-to-reel videotape machine for sale. Knowing that it would need some work before it could be used, it lay tucked away until we received funding late last year to overhaul the machine and get it working in our lab. This is the first in a series of blog posts documenting our progress as we complete work on the restoration of our Sony AV-3650.