Blog topic: Fun facts

As the Stanford Libraries develop to be a fully-realized, 21^st Century Scholarly Workbench, we are thinking strategically about the tools that we supply and the services we support.  No workbench can hold every tool, and we must ensure that we deploy our resources to most effectively meet the needs of the always-evolving Stanford community and the broader research community.  To achieve this strategic alignment, the Stanford Libraries rely heavily on outreach by its staff.

The Stanford Libraries, like the rest of Stanford, has engaged in a long-range planning process which has all of our staff focused on the role that the library plays in a growing, and changing, academic organization.  That process, which has involved both internal review and engagement with faculty, students, and donors, has lead us to develop a new metaphorical model for envisioning the library’s position in the academic sphere: The Scholarly Workbench.

I came across this miniature book, Duke Ellington Remembered: New York Notes, by Whitney Balliett, and thought it perfect for a miniature blog post. It is by far the tiniest book in the Music Library. Balliett (1926-2007) was a journalist and jazz critic who wrote for a number of publications, including for the New Yorker under famed editor William Shawn.  His essays on jazz and jazz musicians have been collected into a number of monographs, many of which are available in the Stanford Libraries.