We’re pleased to share the news of today’s official release of the Bassi Veratti digital collection website. A video highlighting the historical import of the project and resulting site can be viewed on youtube . A version with narration in Italian is also available via youtube.
As part of Sunshine Week -- and in conjunction with the White House's new policy on Open Access to federally funded scientific information -- a small group of government information librarians has started a petition on petitions.whitehouse.gov asking the Obama Administration to assure that there is free permanent public access to ALL authentic government information.
Imagine this scenario:
You worked hard on your research project and are publishing your results in a well-respected journal. You even go so far as to carefully organize the supporting data so that you can share the details of your experiments with others by posting these data online on your web space at Stanford. And you publish that URL in your journal article so everyone will know where to go.
Time passes, and you move on to another institution and another research project. But your data no longer has a home. Once you leave Stanford your web space is no longer accessible. Other researchers find your paper and are interested in your data, but when they type in the URL, all they see is a big ugly notice that says, "Access Denied."
The Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries is pleased to announce that it has successfully completed a CLIR Hidden Collections grant project—Documenting Mexican American and Latino Civil Rights: Records of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA). This project has been one of the largest and most ambitious processing efforts ever undertaken by Special Collections. In the course of the two-year grant, the project team processed 2045 linear feet of MALDEF records and 406 linear feet of CRLA records. Access to these rich collections will give scholars from a wide range of disciplines a major resource for analyzing the civil rights struggles faced by Mexican Americans in the mid-to-late-20th century and will further establish Stanford’s Department of Special Collections as one of the most significant repositories containing collections that document all aspects of the Mexican American and Latino experience.
On April 10, three Stanford librarians will talk to Stanford graduate students about their experiences moving from PhD programs into library work. This event, titled “Alt Ac @ Libraries,” will feature Chris Bourg, AUL for Public Services (PhD in Sociology); Matt Marostica, Subject Specialist for Economics and Political Science (PhD in Political Scicence); and Regan Murphy Kao, Japanese Studies Librarian (PhD in Japanese).
The Oversized Imaging Lab has recently imaged a 70 x 90 inch rolled Map of Santa Clara County from 1914.
It was shot in 108 tiles and stitched together to create a 600 ppi, 55554 x 42686 or 2.371 gigapixel, 7.11 GB digital surrogate. This is the largest object we have imaged in the Map Scanning Lab thus far - it is an exciting milestone!
The Stanford Digital Repository Self-Deposit service has only been in use for a handful of weeks, and we already see a number of deposits that underscore the needs of Stanford researchers for a central, longterm home where they can archive and share the results of their work. Take this dataset in the Folding@home collection, submitted last week by T.J. Lane.
Emeritus Professor Barton J. Bernstein will present a lecture on the U.S.'s decision to use the A-bomb on Japan this Friday night, March 1st, at 6:00 p.m., Building 200 (second floor), Room 205. The hour-long lecture will be followed by a Q&A segment. It is free and open to the public. Prof.