Pope Benedict XVI announces his resignation
Pope Benedict XVI announced today that as of 28 February 2013, he would be resigning from his position as leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
Blogs
Rose Bowl exhibit
Are you counting the days until the 2013 Cardinal football season starts? If so, why not bask in the glow of past victories a little longer -- stop by the Bender Room (on the fifth floor of the Bing Wing) to see a selection of historic Rose Bowl memorabilia from the collections of the Stanford University Archives. The exhibit will be on view through the end of February.
President Harrison ephemera
The Stanford University Archives is pleased to announce the acquisition of a small collection of ephemera documenting President Benjamin Harrison's epic 1891 cross-country railroad journey through nineteen states. The journey covered nearly 10,000 miles, during which time the President made nearly 150 speeches, which were later published in a volume compiled by a correspondent from the New York Mail and Express who accompanied the President's party.
Special Collections receives funds for pilot project regarding email archives
Since its inception in the early 1970s, email has become a durable form of communication – one that presents a massive problem for donors, repositories, and researchers. Over 140 billion email messages are sent every day, and many, if not all have research value as part of an archival collection. Email is used for more than just communication. It is used for collaboration, planning, sharing, conducting transactions, and as an aid to memory – a self-archive. It documents relationships – personal, business, and communal. Our reliance on and daily use of email over the past 40 years has developed rich archival material with a secondary benefit of recording social networks in the header information of senders and recipients.
The Department of Special Collections at SUL proposes to address important facets of stewarding email archives that have not been tackled in previous projects. Characteristics of email such as its relatively stable format standardization as well as the inherent structure itself – header, body, attachments – make email an ideal candidate for automated tools to support archival workflows, such as appraisal and processing, as well as benefitting the user through discovery and delivery.
Posters from the STOP AIDS Project collection available online
We are excited to announce that 187 posters from the STOP AIDS Project records have been digitized, accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository and are now available online via the collection's finding aid.
Istanbul poster exhibition in Green East until March 15
Come take a look at the beautiful new Istanbul poster exhibition in the lobby of Green Library's East Wing. The posters feature photographs and text by students who went to Istanbul last August for a three-week Bing Overseas Seminar with Professor Ali Yaycioğlu of the History Department. There's a corresponding book display highlighting materials about Istanbul from our collection.
The Istanbul poster exhibition will be on display in the lobby of Green East until March 15, 2013.
A user-centered approach to developing digital collection websites
Over the past two years, the Digital Library Systems and Services department at SUL has developed a user-centered approach to building websites. Our methodology involves early and iterative feedback from the primary audience of SUL’s web resources – academic researchers. The intended result is web applications that help users achieve their research goals while at the same time increasing the efficiency of the software development process (thus, lowering the time to development and the cost).
Happy birthday to Michael Pollan
Today's the birthday of Bay Area resident and writer Michael Pollan, born on this date in 1955.