The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) has completed installation of audio and video digitization equipment in its new facilities at 425 Broadway in Redwood City, and has resumed all services. We're 100% back to work, supporting researcher access to SUL's world-class collections of sound recordings and moving images.
During the week of November 4th, Julie Sweetkind-Singer hosted the California Rare Book School (http://www.calrbs.org/) with several sessions held at Stanford University Libraries. The CalRBS is an ongoing program founded by UCLA that educates students interested in the field of rare books. This specific course was designed to provide a general overview of the history of maps in the western world, as well as their use in modern-day teaching and research.
The Archive of Recorded Sound recently held its first ever listening party on October 17th. We were thrilled to welcome over 40 attendees to the event here at the Archive, who were invited to flick through multiple boxes of duplicate 78rpm records, dating from approximately 1900-1940, to select those they would like to hear played on our 1925 Victrola Credenza, just one example from our magnificent phonograph collection here at the Archive which dates from 1904-1930. More details about this collection, including images and demonstration videos, are now available on our website.
Ahead of their 50th anniversary show this Saturday (October 26th) at the Bing Concert Hall, I am very pleased to announce the successful recent completion of a 6 month project aimed at archiving and digitally preserving the Stanford Mendicants' complete recorded output between 1964-2012.
The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) has many partnerships on campus and the recent move provided a great opportunity to spend some time working in the audio room of one of those partners, the Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS). Several recordings were digitized and documented while there. Two projects completed of interest are the digitization of several recordings made by the a cappella group the Stanford Mendicants and the transfer of cassette tapes from the book and audio set: Photochemistry of Organic Molecules (POM) held by the Media & Microtext Center.
The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) is making good progress in setting up shop at our new location in Redwood City.
SMPL moved from Page Mill Road in Palo Alto -- along with HighWire Press, Stanford University Press, LOCKSS, and parts of both Preservation and Special Collections -- to 425 Broadway over Labor Day weekend. (Shortly thereafter Stanford announced plans to redevelop the Redwood City site and create a major auxiliary campus.) We're very excited about the new space! It provides us with several opportunities to streamline and improve our facilities, workflows and services. More about that in a future post. For now, here are some photos illustrating our progress.
The discovery of a particular scanning defect called Bayer moiré, occured while creating image files at Stanford University Library's Map Scanning Lab and prompted a more focused study. The Bayer moiré defect affects the ability of software to lift features from maps digitally.
