Buckminster Fuller has loomed large over the Stanford Media Preservation Lab ever since his archives were fully processed and described in the mid-2000s. Over the past eight years we've been slowly reformatting the extensive media component of this collection, but there was one media format that remained elusive: wire.
This guest blog was written by Natasha Porfirenko, PhD. Natasha is a long-standing and valued contributor to Stanford’s Special Collections for her expertise in Slavic and Eastern European materials. Her work in Special Collections has included processing a large volume of Slavic and Eastern European letters, postcards, objects, and ephemera preserved in Stanford’s archives of material from the committee to free Angela Davis. She is currently hard at work delving into the descriptive metadata of tapes depicting works of famous Soviet choreographer, Leonid Yakobson.
Prior to the institution of shelter-in-place, I had been working on processing the records for the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, a national organization founded in 1895 in California to promote Chinese American rights and community. Physical work has been put on hold during this time.
As the new PBS documentary series the Asian Americans debuts this week, The Department of Special Collections is pleased to make available recently digitized issues of Current Life, a literary and public affairs magazine created in 1940 by Nisei journalist James "Jimmie" Matsumoto Omura (1912–1994), whose papers are held in the Department of Special Co
Here we are again exploring some of the riches contained in an 1880s hotel register from Murphys California, an item from the Gary D. and Myrna R. Lowe collection relating to the Big Tree of California, 1853-2002. You can catch up on the background of this unique volume in Part One.
A new documentary film by Martin Doblmeier on the life of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement includes a number of iconic images of Day from the Bob Fitch Photography Archive held in the Department of Special Collections. The film, Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story, depicts "Dorothy Day's journey from young, communist journalist, to her awakening as co-founder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and "houses of hospitality," sheltering and feeding New York City's homeless d
It shouldn’t be too big a surprise – many individual items in large collections are inevitably overshadowed for one reason or another – but here’s a great example of something really worth a closer look. This California hotel register from the 1880s, acquired by Gary Lowe for his collection of giant Sequoia-related material (the Gary D. and Myrna R.
Many years ago I was fascinated by the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, and how from 1914-1916 Shackleton and his crew were cut off from the world in their harrowing struggle for survival. A remarkable story of courage and perseverance, this epic adventure story captured my attention and imagination.