The Stanford piano roll scanner has progressed from a prototype to a functional, production level machine since the last report in spring of 2017. As reported earlier, the scanner is based on a design by Anthony Robinson, a piano roll expert in England.
The Archives is pleased to announce that the original copy of the Founding Grant is now available online: https://purl.stanford.edu/rb803rc6397. Although previously available in other formats, this is the first time that this one of a kind treasure, now preserved in the Archives, is available in all of its glory.
I am very pleased to announce the hire of Laura Wilsey as our new Cataloging and Metadata Librarian for incoming collections. She will work primarily out of our Stanford Redwood City but will travel to campus as needed as she takes over responsibility for managing metadata for our many complex digitization projects in collaboration with staff from the Metadata Development Unit and DLSS, as well as curators and subject specialists.
I was very interested when recently a colleague from Green Library, David Jordan, alerted me to the existence of several Chinese and Japanese items within the Gunst Collection, also known as the Morgan A. and Aline D. Gunst Memorial Library of the Book Arts. As the name suggests, this collection, which was donated to Stanford Libaries in 1963 and contains over four thousand volumes, is devoted to works that showcase the role of books as artifacts. As I was browsing through the short list of East Asian materials belonging to this collection, I was intrigued by one item in particular, which was described as an eleventh-century print of a Chinese Buddhist scripture.
A pilot project in the Music Library to digitize sheet music and make images available in the SearchWorks catalog has produced its first collection, made up of 140 piano arrangements and transcriptions. Basic records for these items have long been in SearchWorks, and are now greatly enhanced with access to the digital images and options for close examination and download. This collection was chosen for scanning because the paper is too brittle to withstand the handling that results from practice and performance.
This is a guest post from Special Collections Processing Assistant Brian Bethel.
This summer Department of Special Collections @ Redwood City is host to seven students – two of whom have been working on longer term projects. They are each working on a specific processing and metadata (description) projects in order to make our collections accessible and, in some cases, more discoverable online.