Digital Library Program
SUL /AIR's Digital Library Program encompasses both digital resources that are created by us and resources that are offered to Stanford through subscriptions and licenses with external organizations and publishers. The goals of the program are to support the selection, acquisition, creation, provision of access, and preservation of digital content. It provides a locus of integration of the many units involved in digital content development, and depends on collaboration with and support by units throughout SUL /AIR. The collections and services described below are a sampling of recent and current initiatives, and many more initiatives will be coming forward in this multi-faceted and evolving program.
The partnerships and collaboration necessary to support building a digital library extend beyond Stanford. An important component of these wider partnerships is SUL /AIR's membership in the Digital Library Federation (http://www.diglib.org/), a select group of universities committed to active support of digital library initiatives. The information exchange, discussions, programs, support for development of standards and best practices, and other aspects of the DLF are important components of our digital library development.
Image Collections
Over the past two years, SUL /AIR has greatly expanded its digital library activities and capacity in the realm of on-line image collections. Whereas we had previously created significant image collections (such as a popular selection of dime novel and penny dreadful cover art), such projects were most often labor-intensive, single-use, isolated projects. Having understood the significance of digital image collections in research and teaching, we have now embarked on a new era in providing access to them: we have implemented a major image search and delivery system (Insight, by Luna Imaging, Inc.) that provides tools and interfaces for a potentially unlimited number of image collections. Not only do we no longer have to create these tools ourselves from scratch, we now have the major added benefit of a single user interface and cross-collection image searching. At the same time, we are able to share our image collections with other institutions that use this system, and to take advantage of their image collection sharing as well. This means that a user at Stanford might, for example, simultaneously and seamlessly search a Stanford collection of historical manuscripts along with a remote collection of historical maps. The introduction of this system has fomented a new interest in visual resources for research and teaching at Stanford. The center of Insight expertise and support has been the Humanities Digital Information Service (HDIS) (http://www.sul.stanford.edu/depts/ hasrg/hdis/), and it has provided support for a number of important projects, such as the African Maps (described in Notable Additions to the Collections); as well as the Stanford Geological Survey, and Kircher Correspondence, which are described below.
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In the fall of 2001, Branner Library received a grant from the California State Library and matching funds from Stanford to catalogue, scan, and display the maps, field notebooks, and field reports from this collection. The Web site, with a portion of the imagery, came online in late 2002 using the Insight application. When the work has been completed in late 2003, all of the output of the Survey held by the library will be catalogued in Socrates. Most of the maps and the relevant field notebooks and reports will be digitized and freely available over the Internet.The project is supported by Stanford University Libraries, the School of Earth Sciences, and a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.
Kircher Correspondence During his lifetime, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was widely regarded as the physical embodiment of all the learning of his age. A refugee from war-torn Germany, Kircher arrived in Rome just after Galileo's condemnation, where he was heralded as possessing the secret of deciphering hieroglyphics. Kircher had over 760 correspondents, including scientists, physicians, Jesuit missionaries, two Holy Roman emperors, popes, and potentates throughout the globe. The subjects discussed in his voluminous correspondence cover the entire range of his interests. The correspondence constitutes a hugely important resource for the study of early modern Europe, and its interest goes far beyond the study of Kircher's own career. The Kircher Correspondence is of particular interest for the history of early modern science and technique. As well as engaging in correspondence with the most eminent scientists of his time, including Leibniz, Torricelli, and Gassendi, Kircher harnessed the network of Jesuit missionaries to carry out natural observations and experiments on a global scale. The Kircher Correspondence project is largely the work of two visiting scholars at Stanford, Michael John Gorman and Nick Wilding. It is hosted by SUL's installation of the Insight delivery system. Links to further information and access instructions are available at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/hdis/aboutinsight.html
In order to help preserve, enhance, and broaden access to the records of the GATT, the Stanford University Libraries has undertaken a multiyear project. During the first phase (1997-2002), Stanford acquired some 220,000 pages of GATT documentation on microfiche from the World Trade Organization in 1997. In 1999 Stanford entered into an arrangement with the WTO to digitize key documents, publications, and archival material related to the GATT (1947-1994). Over the course of four six-week visits to Geneva between 1999 and 2002, Stanford has created over 1.8 million digital page images from source paper and photographic files.
The project has entered a second phase. Supported with funding from the IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries program, SUL /AIR staff will digitize the GATT microfiche documents acquired in 1997, create associated metadata, and develop a public Web interface to the broader GATT Digital Archive including over 2.2 million digital page and photographic images. Project staff will create an EAD finding aid to the entire GATT Archive. This finding aid will provide for the first time broad public, scholarly, and student access to all GATT public documents and internal documentation. Additionally, staff will create a full-text searching capability to a subset of the entire archive through the use of corrected OCR and XML structural mark-up. This phase of the project should be completed by May 2004. For additional information, please consult the GATT Digital Archive Web site at
http://gatt-archive.stanford.edu. Data Extraction Web Interface (DEWI) The Data Extraction Web Interface, developed by the Social Sciences Data Service, is a web-based system for searching and extracting variables within numeric datasets. It serves Stanford data users by eliminating the need to search for printed codebooks or write programs to extract variables. Online documentation and variable metadata are incorporated into a single convenient system. Variable sample frequencies and other information within DEWI helps the data user decide which variable to extract, and extract files can be directly downloaded to the individual's workstation. DEWI has been used in statistical methods courses to allow students to use "real" data in their assignments, as well as by researchers to explore the relevance of DEWI datasets in their analyses. DEWI contains a growing collection of numeric datasets, such as the General Social Surveys, National Education Longitudinal Studies, the World Values Survey and the European Values Surveys, and others. The DEWI system is available to Stanford at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/ssds Selected Electronic Resources Acquisitions of and subscriptions to networked electronic resources from various vendors are an important component of the SUL/AIR Digital Library Program. These resources span a variety of formats, including databases, full text electronic journals, and full text electronic books. An important development related to these resources is SUL/AIR's membership beginning in September 2001 in the NorthEast Research Libraries (NERL) consortium. NERL membership consists of twenty-one academic research libraries, primarily in the Northeast (e.g., Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell). It is a sign of the impact of our networked environments that it works well for Stanford to participate in and benefit from a consortium that is outside its geographical area. NERL members share the common objectives of access and cost containment, joint licensing, and possible joint deployment of electronic resources. NERL also offers a forum in which members can share information about management and budgeting for electronic resources.Complete and updated links from www-sul.stanford.edu/ to the various digital resources SUL /AIR offers are available on the appropriate Web pages, such as Databases, Electronic Journals, and various subject specific pages. The range in type and coverage is considerable, as shown by a sampling of some recently added resources:n Evans Digital Editionprovides fully searchable, electronic facsimiles of all books printed in North America to 1800.
- Early English Books Onlineconsists of electronic facsimiles of all books printed in English to 1700, with a subset available for full-text searching.
- Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online 1543-1945provides fully searchable, electronic facsimiles of books for the study of women's history in the world.
- Black Drama 1850 to the Presentcontains fully searchable versions of approximately 1200 rare and hard-to-find plays.
- Digital Library of Classic Protestant Textsa collection of texts featuring both text searching and digital page facsimiles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works.
- ebraryfully searchable books (ten thousand plus as of Fall 2002) in various disciplines, with individual options for printing pages.
- Books 24x7 and Safari Tech Bookstwo services focusing on computer and information technology, with complementary coverage of over two thousand books.
- Chronicle of Higher Educationfully searchable current and archived issues, under an initial experiment for institutionwide access for a select group of institutions.
- PsycArticlesprovides full text searching and retrieval for American Psychological Association (and related) journals, and complements the PsycInfo database.
- Columbia Gazetteer of the Worldprovides type of place, place name, and full text searching for over 165,000 places in the world.
- Cambridge Structural Databasecontains crystal structure information for over 257,000 organic and metal organic compounds.