Next week, from Feburary 1-February 5, archives are joining the adult coloring craze with #ColorOurCollections, providing coloring pages made from materials held within their special collections. We're joining in while simultaneously celebrating some newly released digitized material from the José Guadalupe Posada collection, circa 1875-1913.
The University Archives is pleased to announce that it has digitized a remarkable manuscript, "Carry On," written by James M. Robb ('31), a WWII POW who survived the Bataan Death March. The manuscript, written while Robb was a patient at the Bilibid prison-hospital in the Philippines, was buried in a canister under floorboards in a building in the prison by Warrant Officer Earl G. Schweizer, who is referred to often in the manuscript and who was apparently a good friend of James's in the camp.
Our maps continued to be used in publications - today, another article featuring a map of California as an Island, was published in the The Atlantic's Citylab edition.
In today's mail, the newspaper arrived. It wasn't the San Francisco Chronicle on the San Jose Mercury News though. It was a copy of the Finnish newspaper Turun Sanomat, published in Turku, Finland. It wasn't until I turned to page 15 that I recognized something - a reproduction of the 1815 William Smith Map that we had scanned. William Smith published a map of Geology of what is now a good part of the UK, and earlier this year, we, along with the British Geological Society, celebrated 200 years since its publication. The map and article, all in Finnish of course, presumeably talks about the story of the man and how William Smith single-handedly authored and published this map. The newspaper used our scan both in the paper version and also in their online version.
By Deardra Fuzzell and Wayne Vanderkuil
A historic manuscript map and a gem of the Stanford Library Map Collection, the Ōmi Kuni-ezu 近江國絵圖 Japanese Tax Map from 1837 is hand drawn and painted in the round. This map is designed to be displayed on the floor with the viewer standing in its center. From this central vantage point, the map may be read with ease from any direction. As this display and viewing method is no longer possible for a map fast approaching its 200th birthday, Stanford has recently digitized this item to enable access for research, teaching and learning as well as preservation of the original object.
This the largest and most difficult oversized map Stanford has digitized thus far.
See how the Map Program went about imaging this unique item.
Work on the Player Piano Project (PPP) continues at an impressive pace. Recent achievements include the completed cataloging, by Project cataloger Alyssa Hislop, of the Welte Mignon rolls in the Denis Condon Collection of Reproducing Pianos and Rolls, which can now be viewed in Searchworks; a full house at the project’s listening party last Friday; and most recently the launch of a subproject entitled the Piano Roll Scanner Project (PRSP). The PRSP formally marks the start of the digitization phase of the PPP.
The University Archives is pleased to announce that videotaped lectures from Don Knuth's computer science course Mathematical Writing (CS209), given in the fall of 1987, are now available online. The course focused on issues of technical writing and the effective presentation of mathematics and computer science.
There are countless challenges in preserving obsolete media from breadth of formats to lack of documentation at the time of creation. With the history of recorded sound now spanning over one hundred years wide range of technologies utilized in this span, challenges abound for any individual working to capture the range of media in need of preservation. To accomplish this feat constant engagement is required to further understand the media, the way media is degrading, and best practices for preserving historic recordings that range from cylinders to digital multi-track recording sessions.