We're pleased to announce the availability of a new Spotlight at Stanford feature. Exhibit creators can now set up and configure browse groups for their digital exhibits. This high priority feature has been requested by Stanford Libraries staff as well as many external Spotlight stakeholders.
Spotlight was developed by Stanford Libraries in 2013/14 as open source software, to provide a solution enabling librarians, curators and others to create attractive, feature-rich websites that highlight digital collections. This has facilitated its adoption by many universities as a primary digital exhibit platform. In turn, Stanford benefits from community sharing of inspiration, design and code.
On February 8, 9, and 10th 2021, 175 people from across the globe met for the 6th annual Geo4LibCamp. This time the conference was hosted online using the Zoom platform. Previous Geo4LibCamps have been hosted on Stanford University's campus at the Hartley Conference Center and in the David Rumsey Map Center. This year's online event broke prevoius attendence records of the event that brings together those building repository and associated services for geospatial data to share best practices, solve common problems, and address technical issues.
The Lighting the Way project team requests proposals from groups of around 3 to 6 participants to participate in a series of online meetings and collaborative activities over the course of six weeks, starting the week of April 19, 2021. Each working group will develop a written contribution of 5 to 10 pages, exploring topics related to improving archival discovery and delivery, intended for inclusion in a larger handbook compiled and published by the Lighting the Way project team.
To apply, please complete an application form, including a 250-word abstract of your proposed topic and potential group participants, no later than March 8, 2021. A PDF version of the application form is available for your reference. Participants will be notified by March 29, 2021 if selected to participate.
These contributions are intended to build on the work of Lighting the Way: A National Forum on Archival Discovery and Delivery, held at Stanford University in February 2020, which focused on information sharing and collaborative problem solving to improve discovery and delivery for archives and special collections. The Forum provided rich opportunities for discovering points of convergence, which can be explored in the Preliminary Report on the Forum. Topics generated by Forum participants may provide a starting point for proposals, but applicants are welcome to propose topics that are not represented in the Preliminary Report appendices.
The Lighting the Way project team is pleased to announce the publication of Lighting the Way: A Preliminary Report on the National Forum on Archival Discovery and Delivery, which summarizes and synthesizes the activities and outcome from the event hosted by Stanford Libraries in February 2020. The Forum focused on information sharing and collaborative problem solving around improving discovery and delivery for archives and special collections, with 71 participants drawn from multiple disciplines and job functions in the archives, library, and technology sectors. Using both plenary presentations and activities drawn from human-centered design principles to highlight opportunities and challenges, as well as potential areas for further work.
The project will host a series of online working meetings and asynchronous activities in Spring 2021 focused on collaborative writing and in-depth exploration of topics and themes raised in the Forum. Further information on the working meeting, including a call for participation, will be made available in January 2021 from the project website.
Contributors to this issue are: Cathy Aster, Peter Chan, Nicole Coleman, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, and Annie Schweikert. Thanks to our many collaborators!
The Stanford RegLab and the Stanford Literary Lab have both been processing and analyzing large text corpora for many years now and both recently received a chunk of OCR content from Stanford Libraries thanks to work that DLSS has undertaken to retrieve the digital files of more than 3 million items from the Stanford Libraries catalog that were scanned by Google.
This month Stanford Libraries is launching a collaborative project to expand access to our extensive holdings of American dime novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dime novels, which flourished in the United States in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, featured an ever-evolving array of popular fiction genres: frontier stories modeled on the work of James Fenimore Cooper, detective stories, westerns, romances, sports stories. Widely read in their day, dime novels provided cheap fiction for an expanding reading public. Today, many dime novels are in particularly fragile condition due to the cheap nature of the paper used in their production, and collections are spread across the country with few institutions holding complete runs of major dime novel series.