Last week I spent 3 days at Google for their annual Google Earth Engine Summit, learning about new features and applications of their Google Earth Engine technology. If you haven’t seen Google Earth Engine, I encourage you to go to https://earthengine.google.com and use the signup link to get an account. It’s absolutely free for non-commercial use and it’s capabilities are pretty mind-blowing.
Objects from the David Rumsey Map Collection are featured in Atlas Obscura's Map Monday for January 30, 2017, features maps from John Emslie and James Reynolds.From Atlas Obscura's feature: "Have you ever wondered what the tallest active volcano is? Or wanted to compare the height of mountain peaks and the lengths of rivers around the world?
The Stanford University Libraries (SUL) has introduced new features in its online catalog, SearchWorks, and the Stanford Digital Repository to make it easier for users worldwide to get access to a treasure trove of high resolution digital images. The basis of these new features is the International Image Interoperability Framework, a global initiative co-founded by SUL to support the creation of a global network of broadly accessible images curated and produced by libraries, museums, archives and galleries to support research, teaching and broad public use.
On August 9-10, the Yale University Libraries and Yale Center for British Art hosted an event to showcase the open source software platform called Spotlight (http://spotlight.projectblacklight.org).
Over the next few weeks I will post a series of brief step-by-step "how-to" tutorials on making use of digital resources from the David Rumsey Map Center and Collection, that I presented in my "Hacking Rumsey" talk, presented at the opening events for The David Rumsey Map Center, at Stanford University Library.
We're starting small, with the easiest tools (like the David Rumsey Map Collection MapTab Chrome Browser Plug-in, which I covered in a previous post) that appeal to the most people, first. Eventually we will work our way up through more complex use of the collections and tools available from The Stanford University Library.
In keeping with shallow tradition, it's taken me a few weeks to collect my thoughts on the recently-concluded IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference, hosted this year by the National and University Library of Iceland. In the wake of last year's meeting, I speculated on what developments in web archiving we might together effect in the year ahead (now behind). Nearly a year later, that conceit provides a convenient jumping-off point for reflecting on how it all went, where we might go from here, and the tremendous amount of work to do in our one remaining collective month before the anniversary of that post. :)
Dovetailing our recent announcement of documentation of resources for research using web archives, we will be visited next month by an individual who has done much to advance web archives as materials of scholarly interest and exploration.
Since our collaboration with political science researchers using web archives to understand the 2014 U.S. congressional elections, we've seen (and, hopefully, helped foster) growing interest in web archives as primary source material. This trend parallels a similar refocusing by other web archiving programs toward enhancing access services and facilitating research use. The maturity and the variety of these efforts, as well as the accumulating body of resulting research, provide an expanding list of references with which to orient and entice prospective researchers to the potential of working with web archives.