How do students develop as writers? How do we study the process of writing development? How can we apply such learnings to improve writing instruction? These are the primary questions driving the Stanford Study of Writing, a research project led by Andrea Lunsford, the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English Emerita, in 2001-2006.
Over this past summer, I have had the privilege and opportunity to work in Special Collections. During this time, I processed a couple of fascinating collections: African Posters and Ephemera and the Charles Hobson Collection. In the following article I will talk a little about my experience processing materials, as well as give an overview of the newly available collections and their potential to be used in various research projects.
We are happy to report on a study conducted during the past academic year on stakeholder expectations and needs for text search capabilities in SUL’s digital library ecosystem, to inform future software development priorities and possible service expansion.
The study was conducted through interviews with six SUL bibliographers, one Hoover curator, one academic technology specialist, and two representatives from Special Collections.
On Thursday, July 18, students in the popular culture course at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institute visited the Department of Special Collections to view materials from the Fielder Collection of American Sheet Music.
From micro-published contemporary poetry to advanced reader’s copies to illustrated fairy tales, Stanford Libraries celebrates the creativity of student book collecting through its administration of the biennial Wreden Prize for Collecting Books and Related Materials. This year was no exception as students submitted collections on topics ranging from California’s religious history to editions of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Each student enters the prize competition by submitting an essay about his or her collection and an annotated bibliography of its contents.
The following is a guest post by Seth Pollack (Director, Service Learning Institute, California State University, Monterey Bay) and Tim Stanton (Senior Engaged Scholar, Ravensong Associates; Director Emeritus, Bing Overseas Studies Program, Cape Town, Stanford University).
At the beginning of July we announced the release of Stanford Libraries' new viewer for image items in the Stanford Digital Repository. The viewer now provides enhanced support for full text search, with a new user interface afforded by the integration of Mirador 3 in the July 1st release.
Please view the following video to see a demonstration of full text search basics.
It's likely not news to you that Stanford researchers are undertaking all manner of cutting-edge and groundbreaking work. Applied Physics graduate student Aaron Sharpe is one such researcher who has become intrigued by a single-atom-thick layer of carbon called graphene that he says has, "continuously shaken up the field of condensed matter physics." Graphene sheets, as well as stacks of these sheets, show "unique and tunable electronic properties." We see why Aaron couldn't resist! We talked to Aaron about the research he and his colleagues have been undertaking with graphene and that has recently been published in Science.
Outreach by Stanford science librarians led Aaron to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), which he used to make the data and code for this publication publicly-available. "We chose the SDR because it was an easy process to make our data publicly available and permanent and to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) to reference it in our publication." We completely agree with Aaron's comment that "with any publication, it is important that the data be publicly available."