Professor Donald Emmerson from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies found seven 5.25 floppy disks containing files created using WordPerfect 5.1 under MS DOS 3.3 in 1992 and 1993. Dave Sare at the Institute posted " Professor needs to convert old files SOLUTION" in the expert partners mailing list and thereafter we are connected.
The Manuscripts Division is please to announce two recent hires: Christy Smith and Joe Geller. Both have been long time soft-funded staff members at the library.
The Forensics / Born-Digital lab recently received a request from the Earth Sciences Library to recover the data off of a Zip disk. The Zip disk format was created by Iomega corporation in 1994 and was a large floppy disk like format with a capacity of 100 MB. The drives are no longer commercially available but the Forensics / Born-Digital lab has a Zip disk drive to recover data from this format.
The University Archives is pleased to showcase the results of ongoing efforts to collect and make available online born-digital materials from Stanford student organizations. The first such collection to be made available via the Stanford Digital Repository is records of the annual "Listen to the Silence" conference organized by the Asian American Students' Association (AASA).
With the University Archives making more and more collections available online, I'd like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the novel ways in which these materials are being used by researchers. What follows is a recent report from Ed Feigenbaum, Kumagai Professor of Computer Science Emeritus, about how his papers in particular are yielding interesting connections:
The Undergraduate Theses collections for Physics and Engineering Physics are now open for deposit. This year’s crop of top undergraduates in the Department of Physics and in the Engineering Physics program have the distinction of being the first undergrads to deposit their theses in the SDR. These two are the first of several honors theses collections opening this quarter. (The School of Education is assembling their collection together now, and two other departments may follow suit.)
Librarian Stella Ota manages the collections, working with faculty, staff, and the selected students to use the Self Deposit application. She has been collecting digital honors theses offline since 2010. When the ETD system launched in fall 2009, Stella had a vision for using a similar process to collect the Physics undergraduate theses for access and preservation in the SDR. Yet without a deposit interface, it proved to be challenging to track down each student, to have them sign a hard-copy deposit agreement, to collect the PDF files by thumbdrive or email, and to create the metadata. The Self Deposit workflow promises to make the whole process of collecting and archiving these works more systematic, more secure, and more efficient.
On April 17th the Stanford University Libraries held a special talk by architect, designer, and sustainable growth pioneer, William McDonough, co-author, with Michael Braungart, of the exciting new book: The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance. We are pleased to be able to share the video of the event.
Since the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation system launched in November 2009, Stanford's PhD and Engineering graduate students have had the option to submit their culminating works either online or on paper. For many students, the choice is easy to make: electronic submission is convenient, quick, and costs nothing whereas the traditional option requires producing multiple printed copies of the thesis and paying an accompanying fee (starting at $126).