Blog topic: Digitization

The Queen of the Night, detail from Mozart's Zauberflöte

Opern-Typen: opera meets the comics

January 12, 2016
by Ray Heigemeir

Opern-Tÿpen. Berlin : G. Kölle, [ca. 1882]

Opern-Tÿpen consists of six volumes of chromolithographic plates depicting scenes from 54 operas popular in 19th century Germany. Each opera plot has been distilled into a mere six frames, with liberally adapted accompanying text. The visual charms of Opern-Typen are evident. The plates reveal a sophisticated understanding of the effective use of line, gesture, and composition to convey drama and comedy in a tight narrative sequence. Future research may determine if these drawings captured or were informed by real-life performances, as is suggested by the inclusion of staging and scenic elements.

WILPF Logo

Celebrating 100 years of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

One hundred years ago today on April 28, 1915, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was formed when 1200 women from neutral and warring nations met in the Hague, Netherlands with the aim of negotiating the end of World War I, and to urge peaceful resolution and ‘continuous mediation’ to avoid future conflicts.
 
In conjunction with this centenary anniversary, the Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS) is very pleased to announce the release of 256 recordings of oral history interviews conducted with over 90 veteran members of WILPF from local California and other states’ branches in the USA. These recordings, part of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Collection, are now freely accessible to the world via Searchworks. Also featured are recordings from the 1967 WILPF National Conference at Asilomar, in Pacific Grove, CA. 

Art of Jazz

The Archive of Recorded Sound is pleased to announce the acquisition and recently completed processing of the Art Vincent Jazz Collection. The collection features over 800 hours of interviews, broadcasts, and call-in segments primarily created for the radio program Art of Jazz, produced and presented by Art Vincent (1926-1993), Jazz DJ and concert producer. The show aired on radio stations in the New York Metropolitan area between 1961 and the mid 1980s, including WFHA, WJLK, WRLB, and WGBO. In addition to some live concert recordings, the show notably featured interviews with major figures in the jazz world, such as Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Buddy DeFranco, Woody Herman, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Lou Rawls, Roy Eldridge, Skitch Henderson, Art Farmer, Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson, Stan Getz, Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Stephane Grappelli, Dizzy Gillespie, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Vera Auer, Ruth Brown, Betty Carter, Etta Jones, Sheila Jordan, Nellie Lutcher, Anita O'Day, Shirley Scott, Maxine Sullivan, Nancy Wilson, and many others. 

Theremin at Stanford

The Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS) and Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) recently worked with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), specifically Emeritus Professor John Chowning and current CCRMA director and Duca Family Professor Chris Chafe, to locate, research, and digitize a series of videos from the Archive's CCRMA Tape Collection (ARS.0037) documenting a significant event in the history of CCRMA and electronic and computer music at Stanford. 

In September 1991, numerous pioneers of electronic and computer music, including Robert Moog and Max Mathews, convened at Stanford during the University's centennial weekend (Sept 27-29, 1991) for a concert and symposium honoring the then 95 year-old inventor of the first practical electronic musical instrument, Leon Theremin. Theremin's instrument, which bears his surname, has become arguably one of the most well known and recognizable electronic musical instruments ever devised, and has since inspired numerous subsequent inventions, such as Max Mathews' radio batons. It has been used in countless musical works, perhaps most famously in the Beach Boys 1966 hit, Good Vibrations. It also gave rise to the career of virtuoso Theremin performer, Clara Rockmore. 

ars0033_7inch_d86

Melissa and Stevie receive a holiday greeting

December 18, 2014
by Nathan Coy

A wide range of sound recordings come to SMPL for digitization. Recently two disc recordings from the Archive of Recorded Sound’s Non-Commercial disc collection (ARS 0033) appeared in our queue: 6” duo disc blanks likely dating from the late 1940’s into the early 1950’s with recordings on one side. The discs appear to be have been recorded by a service called Santa Gram that sold semi-custom recorded greetings from Santa to children. 

Historic "fugitive" US document found and made available by Stanford Libraries

December 18, 2014
by Mr. James R. (Librarian) Jacobs

(NOTE: this was first posted on Free Government Information blog as "What makes a "fugitive document" a fugitive?").

First off, I'd like to thank GPO (now the Government Publishing Office!) for posting about this Historic Fugitive Document Available through the CGP. I'd like to give a little context and parse out what makes a fugitive document -- a document that is within scope of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) but for whatever reason is not distributed by GPO to depository libraries -- a fugitive?

Bridget Whearty and Astrid Smith in the digitization lab

Making a digital medieval manuscript

As the CLIR postdoctoral fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford I work primarily with data about large collections of digitized manuscripts and fragments. For example, I have helped to make our teaching collections more easily discoverable in Searchworks. I've also been bringing together partner institutions' descriptive metadata to feed a specialized manuscript search environment. 

In practice, I write code to transform batches of 70, 300, 500, or 1000+ manuscripts at a time: I've gotten very comfortable thinking of medieval manuscripts in the tens, hundreds, and even thousands. But the truth is that these large batches of digital-medieval manuscripts I curate are built of unique, single objects. Single objects that, just like the physical objects they grow from, are made by individual people, in particular environments, under specific institutional, financial, and social pressures. 

In order to better understand the process that leads to the creation of a digital-medieval book, I recently followed the digitization of a fifteenth-century book of hours, Stanford University Libraries, M0379, from the request for digitization, through the slow hard work of taking the images and hours of post-production labor, to its arrival in Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). 

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