The Society of American Archivists has established October 2nd as #AskAnArchivist Day, focused on outreach through answering questions posted to Twitter with the hashtag #AskAnArchivist. The Lighting the Way project team sees this a great opportunity to reach out to the archives and special collections community around starting to think about the big questions facing our project.
The purpose of oral history testimony is not only to gather facts, but also to gain a deeper understanding of events as they were lived and filtered through personal reflection. Unlike most documentation from th[e] period - written by the perpetrators – oral testimony gives a voice to the survivors and other witnesses, allowing them to speak directly about their personal experiences. [Source: Visual History Archive website.]
We are excited to welcome Quentin Verwaerde of the French national library school, ENSSIB, to Stanford Libraries for term-long internship. He’ll mainly be working with Nicole Coleman and Sarah Sussman, but is looking forward to meeting folks around the library. To introduce him to SUL, we’ve asked him to tell us a bit about himself -
Stanford University’s Cathy Aster, Product and Service Manager in Digital Library Systems and Services graciously invited me to write a second guest blog post for the Digital Library Blog earlier this year, so here I am, belatedly taking her up on that generous offer.
In May, 2019, three colleagues launched an exhibit to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death by celebrating the books and ideas that shaped his world. Leonardo's Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader will be on display through mid-October in the Green Library Bing Wing. The three colleagues, Prof. Paula Findlen, John Mustain (Emeritus Curator of Rare Books), and Elizabeth Fischbach (exhibits designer and manager for Stanford Libraries Special Collections), brought a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and experience to a real blockbuster demonstration of what can be accomplished when Stanford faculty, libraries, and a team of exceptional students come together to tell a story with our collections. We're happy to announce a new online exhibit, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/leonardo, to parallel and augment the physical experience and preserve a memory of this event for posterity.
We are pleased to announce Lighting The Way: A National Forum on Archival Discovery and Delivery, a year-long project running from September 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020, funded by the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Lighting the Way will convene a series of national meetings focused on enhancing discovery and delivery for archives and special collections. The project builds on current and past efforts at Stanford Libraries around archives and technology, including ArcLight, ePADD, and the AIMS project.
In October 2019, the project team will launch an open application and nomination process for a National Forum, scheduled for January 2020, dedicated to discussion and brainstorming about both current successes and challenges to effective archival discovery and delivery. Project funding includes participant support costs for archives, library, and technology workers interested in improving how user-facing systems that support archival discovery and delivery work together. Find out more about Lighting the Way, including information on the project team, its goals, and its expected outcomes on our project website.
Stanford Libraries is organizing a work cycle later this year for ArcLight, a Rails engine supporting discovery of archival material. The work cycle is expected to run from August 12 to October 11, 2019, with planned contributions in terms of staff and development time from Stanford University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and Princeton University. This work expands upon the work undertaken between April to June 2017 to develop a minimum viable product, and focuses on adding features, fixing bugs, and ensuring it is better suited as a product for future adoption and development.
As a part of planning for this work cycle, Stanford, Michigan, Indiana, and Princeton have begun developing a collaborative roadmap to help us scope candidate areas of development. Following the process undertaken recently by the Spotlight community, we are now looking for contributions to and feedback on the roadmap to inform our work. If you’ve previously shared evaluations of ArcLight internal to your organization, we welcome you incorporating your ideas for features and improvements to this document. Our first deadline for contributions to the ArcLight work cycle roadmap is June 28, 2019.
The ArcLight MVP project team has completed our eight-week work cycle to develop a minimum viable product to support discovery and delivery of archival materials using Blacklight, and have released ArcLight 0.1. More details, including a demo video and list of implemented features, follow below. The code for ArcLight, as well as documentation on how to get started can be found on GitHub.