It’s back to school time! As students return to campus for the new academic year, we look back at the stream of undergraduate theses and other capstone works published in the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) by graduating students last year. As usual, it was a healthy crop! The 2019 year is particularly noteworthy due to the high number of deposited works distinguished with prizes and medals.
In May, 2019, three colleagues launched an exhibit to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death by celebrating the books and ideas that shaped his world. Leonardo's Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader will be on display through mid-October in the Green Library Bing Wing. The three colleagues, Prof. Paula Findlen, John Mustain (Emeritus Curator of Rare Books), and Elizabeth Fischbach (exhibits designer and manager for Stanford Libraries Special Collections), brought a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and experience to a real blockbuster demonstration of what can be accomplished when Stanford faculty, libraries, and a team of exceptional students come together to tell a story with our collections. We're happy to announce a new online exhibit, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/leonardo, to parallel and augment the physical experience and preserve a memory of this event for posterity.
Welcome to the Summer 2019 Digital Library Services Newsletter, prepared by the Product and Service Management team! This newsletter includes contributions from: Cathy Aster, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, Michael Olson, and Josh Schneider.
How do students develop as writers? How do we study the process of writing development? How can we apply such learnings to improve writing instruction? These are the primary questions driving the Stanford Study of Writing, a research project led by Andrea Lunsford, the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English Emerita, in 2001-2006.
We are happy to report on a study conducted during the past academic year on stakeholder expectations and needs for text search capabilities in SUL’s digital library ecosystem, to inform future software development priorities and possible service expansion.
The study was conducted through interviews with six SUL bibliographers, one Hoover curator, one academic technology specialist, and two representatives from Special Collections.
It's likely not news to you that Stanford researchers are undertaking all manner of cutting-edge and groundbreaking work. Applied Physics graduate student Aaron Sharpe is one such researcher who has become intrigued by a single-atom-thick layer of carbon called graphene that he says has, "continuously shaken up the field of condensed matter physics." Graphene sheets, as well as stacks of these sheets, show "unique and tunable electronic properties." We see why Aaron couldn't resist! We talked to Aaron about the research he and his colleagues have been undertaking with graphene and that has recently been published in Science.
Outreach by Stanford science librarians led Aaron to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), which he used to make the data and code for this publication publicly-available. "We chose the SDR because it was an easy process to make our data publicly available and permanent and to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) to reference it in our publication." We completely agree with Aaron's comment that "with any publication, it is important that the data be publicly available."
Digital Library Systems and Services is happy to welcome Andrew Berger to our staff in the role of Repository Manager. His first day with Stanford Libraries is July 22, 2019.
In this role, Andrew will build on his recent experience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where he served for five years as Senior Digital Archivist responsible for managing the museum's digital repository and for coordinating the museum's digital preservation activities across the content life-cycle, from initial acquisition to long-term preservation and public access.
When you think about rocks, you might not think about energy, but Christopher Zahasky does. Chris has been looking at vesicular basaltic volcanic rocks, like the one shown below, and the way fluid flows through them (see the graphical abstract for his recent article above). "These volcanic rocks are an important source of geothermal energy and provide a potential location for large-scale subsurface carbon dioxide storage for greenhouse gas emissions mitigation," Chris told us. "Understanding fluid flow is important for more effectively using these types of geologic systems for sustainable energy resource development."