On last Friday's show, Rachel Maddow admitted to being a "total dork" about the Oxford English Dictionary. She closed the show with a piece -- titled "Refer Madness" which made me chuckle :-) -- about a bibliographic mystery currently stumping OED staff.
The Undergraduate Theses collections for Physics and Engineering Physics are now open for deposit. This year’s crop of top undergraduates in the Department of Physics and in the Engineering Physics program have the distinction of being the first undergrads to deposit their theses in the SDR. These two are the first of several honors theses collections opening this quarter. (The School of Education is assembling their collection together now, and two other departments may follow suit.)
Librarian Stella Ota manages the collections, working with faculty, staff, and the selected students to use the Self Deposit application. She has been collecting digital honors theses offline since 2010. When the ETD system launched in fall 2009, Stella had a vision for using a similar process to collect the Physics undergraduate theses for access and preservation in the SDR. Yet without a deposit interface, it proved to be challenging to track down each student, to have them sign a hard-copy deposit agreement, to collect the PDF files by thumbdrive or email, and to create the metadata. The Self Deposit workflow promises to make the whole process of collecting and archiving these works more systematic, more secure, and more efficient.
On April 17th the Stanford University Libraries held a special talk by architect, designer, and sustainable growth pioneer, William McDonough, co-author, with Michael Braungart, of the exciting new book: The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance. We are pleased to be able to share the video of the event.
Yesterday's panel discussion at Stanford Law School on 3D printing aroused more questions than it answered, especially given the diverse perspectives, assumptions, interests and even misunderstanding among the general public and within professional circles regarding what it is, it's wider implications and who, when and where (if found necessary) should regulate it. Legal issues stemming from product liability in cases of injury, copyright and patent infringement, as well as freedom and protections accorded to manufacturers, sellers and user were discussed. Similarities were drawn between the advent of the internet and the current 3D printing movement
Chromebooks are low-cost, ultra-portable, secure, fast, "web-based" computing devices running ChromeOS, a complete operating system based on the Google Chrome web browser. They are optimized for Google Apps and off-line saving and editing of your Google Docs.
Samsung Chromebooks are now available for 7-day loan at the Terman Engineering Library!
Since the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation system launched in November 2009, Stanford's PhD and Engineering graduate students have had the option to submit their culminating works either online or on paper. For many students, the choice is easy to make: electronic submission is convenient, quick, and costs nothing whereas the traditional option requires producing multiple printed copies of the thesis and paying an accompanying fee (starting at $126).
The Big Idea Festival was a big deal to the students enrolled in "Computers and Interfaces: Psychological and Societal Perspectives", an undergraduate course (Communications 169) taught by Cliff Nass in Winter 2013. The event, which took place at Stanford on March 11, was a showcase of projects produced by teams of students with the assignment to imagine and design innovative interactions between automobiles and the people who drive them.
In 2012, the Stanford University Archives acquired 312 digital images and 36 prints of the 2006 Stanford Powwow taken by noted photographer Ira Nowinski. The entire set of images is currently available for viewing via the iStanford app, on Pinterest, and through the Stanford Digital Repository. Stanford Powwow 2013 will be held this Mother’s Day Weekend, May 10-12, in the Eucalyptus Grove on campus. It is open to the public.