The Forensics / Born-Digital lab recently received a request from the Earth Sciences Library to recover the data off of a Zip disk. The Zip disk format was created by Iomega corporation in 1994 and was a large floppy disk like format with a capacity of 100 MB. The drives are no longer commercially available but the Forensics / Born-Digital lab has a Zip disk drive to recover data from this format.
Transformation is a common theme among the eight final student team projects of this year's ME310 cohort. Take, for example, Idéum, which proposes how to transform an old building in a Swedish coastal town into an innovation center for Volvo workers who insist "that they [are] not innovative people." The students ask, and then answer, "How might we build confidence and make a user feel like an innovative genius, with a tool that actually helps develop creative skills?"
In the third of a series of posts our Stanford University Libraries 1st-generation intern Abraham Tewolde has produced during his summer at the Archive of Recorded Sound, Abraham discusses the research work he is currently undertaking into the Archive's world class phonograph collection. This work has involved him learning basic research methodology, utilizing Searchworks, XSearch, and other such discovery tools to identify books, articles, and online resources pertaining to phonographs. I tasked Abraham with improving upon the Archive's current information for each phonograph, locating information for facets such as original price, city and country of production, date of production, and any additional background information he found during his search. The results of his research will form the basis of a description for each item in an upcoming online phonograph gallery, to be published shortly on the Archive's website.
AutoDesk announced that it is releasing a ton of stuff into the Creative Commons. “The group adopted the Creative Commons licensing which means 20,000 pages of documentation, 70 videos and 140 downloadable 3D asset files are now ready to be modified, remixed and shared globally.”
AutoDesk said soon all AutoDesk online help, learning channel movies, podcasts, support articles and downloadable materials will be placed under the Creative Commons model -- even their AutoDesk University training content past and future.
The University Archives is pleased to announe that it has added several items to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) recently. Included amongst the treasures are a variety of University maps and motion pictures, as well as faculty papers. Highlights include:
Making historical data sets available to the world is one of the many ways the Stanford Digital Repository is promoting data preservation and sharing. This Deposit of the Week from Hopkins Marine Station is a perfect example of that.
Pisaster ochraceus--the ochre sea star--lives along the rocky coast of Central California and the Hopkins Marine Life Refuge. Studies of the ochre sea star population over time help scientists better understand what is happening to the population and how outside forces like the reintroduction of a possible predator or local environmental changes can affect it.
BrowZine is a tablet application that lets you browse, read and monitor thousands of scholarly journals available from the Stanford University Libraries.
• Browse titles by subject to easily find journals of interest
• Create a personal bookshelf of favorite journals
• Be alerted when a new issue of a journal is published
• Save articles in your personal library. BrowZine can easily be synced up with Box.com, Mendeley, Zotero, and other services to help keep all of your information together in one place.
The Open Web Camp V was held last weekend, July the 13th at the PayPal Town Hall in San Jose, CA. It featured diverse speakers on a wide range of topics spanning different aspects of the Open Web Platform and beyond. These included HTML5, CSS3, Web Accessibility, Responsive Web Design and Mobile Technology topics, but also provide opportunities for networking with peers. Participants were equally drawn from diverse backgrounds including education institutions (Stanford, and SUL staff attended), e-commerce, non-profits, business, open source activists and hobbyists among others. Two of the sessions - one on mobile web performance presented by web developer Estelle Weyl, and another on stifling patterns among teams by Bill Scott, SVP of UI Engineering at PayPal will be reviewed, with an emphasis on aspects relevant to SUL.