Blog topic: Science

December 13 is a momentous date in the history of the Stanford Digital Repository. It's the date in 2012 when the very first research data item was deposited in the SDR through our online deposit application. Which makes Dec. 13, 2014, the second anniversary of this historic occasion!

Who was our first depositor, how did he find us, and what did he deposit? 

Prof. Brian Cantwell has a new IEEE Spectrum feature article reporting on the work of Stanford University researchers who are improving hybrid rockets.  These hybrids are designed to deliver a huge amount of thrust while avoiding the most dangerous drawback of liquid-fueled and solid-propellant rockets—uncontrolled combustion and explosion.

Read the full article in IEEE Spectrum.

A couple of weeks ago, Stanford University Libraries hosted Dame Wendy Hall, Jim Hendler, and other web scientists affiliated with the Web Science Trust for a briefing on the Web Observatory initiative and a follow-on workshop organized by Lisa Green from Common Crawl. The notion of a Web Observatory implies a center proferring scientific instruments, but for the analysis of web data rather than natural phenomena. Indeed, the group's vision is that Web Observatories provide access to web datasets, projects, and tools. Eventually, a network of Web Observatories might offer both an interoperable architecture and distributed infrastructures for sharing and analysis of web datasets. The initiative touches on several areas of interest and investment by Stanford University Libraries, including data curation, web archiving, and supporting social science research.