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Arial view of Gezi Park, Taksim, Istanbul

Finding credible sources of information about the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul

What exactly happened in Turkey last month and what is happening at this moment? What kind of historical events led up to it? You can find information on the history of the Turkish government and politics in SearchWorks.

On May 28, 2013 a peaceful sit-in at Gezi Park in Taksim, Istanbul was disrupted by police and resulted in a number of deaths and many injuries. The sit-in was a response to an announcement made by the government for plans to demolish the small park and replace it with a shopping mall. After the violent police reaction, many other protests about governmental personal liberty infringements in Turkey formed and grew into movements.

These movements emulate the Occupy movements from the western world and are rapidly spreading throughout the rest of Turkey (Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, Trabzon, Samsun Edirne, and many other cities). The popular Turkish band “Kardeş Türküler” has even produced a protest video on YouTube. Social media outlets, especially Twitter, are playing an important part in the quick distribution of public information. In response, Prime Minister Erdogan called Twitter a “menace.”

For current English-language news about the situation in Turkey we have links to daily online newspapers and their Facebook and Twitter accounts as well:

Posted in Stanford Libraries Blog by John A Eilts
Topics: News, SearchWorks
June 17, 2013 at 9:49am

Seven million resources!

SearchWorks has just crossed a threshold: when you check the catalog, you're now looking at records for more than seven million library resources!

Posted in Stanford Libraries Blog by Christopher Matson
Topics: SearchWorks
May 15, 2013 at 10:22am

Digital collections now viewable in SearchWorks
Today marks a major milestone in Stanford University LIbraries' ability to provide easy and seamless access to digital collections.  As of today, digital collections will begin appearing in SearchWorks, the Libraries' discovery interface. This means that collections can be discovered in the course of searching and browsing through the totality of Stanford's library collection. For example, a search on the "burning of San Francisco" will not only turn up books, videos and conference proceedings, but also a 1906 lithograph of the city burning, from the Reid Dennis collection.  
 
Because each collection item links to its parent collection object within SearchWorks, researchers can easily discover and browse through entire digital collections, such as this set of 1,402 portraits from the Leon Kolb collection, just by discovering any item from the collection.  This is a signifcant enhancement to scholars' abilities to see "items in context" and for discovering related items.   
 
Prior to this major SearchWorks enhancement our digital collections were available either through special digital collections web sites, such as http://collections.stanford.edu/, or through PURL (persistent URL) pages for individual objects, such as this 18th century map of California as an Island: http://purl.stanford.edu/hm809qj3660
 
A big part of the work leading up to these additions is creating the pipeline to add future collections automatically to SearchWorks. Next month we expect the advent of more new collections for manuscripts, maps and data sets, and then an ever increasing flow of records. 
Posted in Digital Library Blog by Tony Navarrete
Topics: Stanford Digital Repository, SearchWorks
March 29, 2013 at 6:31am

Stanford University Open Sources SearchWorks' Nearby on Shelf Code

Last week Stanford open sourced the code responsible for the Nearby on Shelf feature in SearchWorks as the Blacklight Browse Nearby gem.  This feature has been highly sought after by various Blacklight institutions to be contributed back to the community.  In keeping with the spirit of the vibrant open source community around Blacklight, Stanford has contributed the development effort to get this codebase available for use and contribution by other Blacklight implementers.

The release of this software was the culmination of a re-write of the SearchWorks code making it an installable package, more generalizable, and suitable in an open source context.  Due to that fact, the end product is much more generic that SearchWorks'  version (as you can see in the side-by-side screenshots below with SearchWorks being on the right) however it is infinitely more customizable.

Read more
Posted in Digital Library Blog by Jessie E Keck
Topics: Web, SearchWorks, Open Source, Blacklight
September 5, 2012 at 12:51pm