Stanford Digital Repository

The SDR preserves a wide range of content in many forms: text, images, data sets, geo-spatial resources, audio, moving images, games, web sites, and more. In addition to the large volume of books and other publications digitized in Stanford Libraries' ongoing efforts to provide online access to its holdings, the SDR contains several notable collections.

Google Books
Stanford was one of the original libraries to partner in the Google Library Project, a core part of the larger Google Books initiative to digitize, search and index the world’s printed books. Files -- page images, full text, and metadata -- produced in the scanning of Stanford’s print collections are stored in the SDR. Ingest of the files began in November 2010.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In November 2009, Stanford University launched an Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) program enabling graduate students to submit dissertations and master’s theses in digital format to the Stanford Digital Repository. The SDR provides ongoing management of the PDF file submitted by the student along with any accompanying supplemental files, such as data sets, high-resolution images, and multimedia. The works are accessible from Stanford’s online catalog as well as Google. This approach marks a major departure from the way Stanford theses and dissertations have been submitted, preserved, and disseminated in the past.

More information about this pioneering initiative is available.

Preserving Virtual Worlds
The SDR preserves content collected by Stanford Libraries for the Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW) project. In a collaboration led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the University of Maryland, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Second Life (Linden Lab), the Library of Congress, and Stanford, PVW explores methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Content managed by the SDR includes early video games, scans of the virtual reality world Second Life, and crawls of web sites documenting game culture. This project is funded by the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIIPP).

National Geospatial Digital Archive
Stanford worked jointly with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) on creating the National Geospatial Digital Archive with funding from the Library of Congress' NDIIPP initiative. Some 27,000 objects (3.5 TB) from the NGDA are preserved in the SDR, including TIFFs, GeoTIFFs, Shapefiles, Digital Elevation Models, and Digital Orthophoto Quadrangle files. More about this project is available in the Projects section.

Parker on the Web
Parker Library on the Web is a multi-year undertaking of Corpus Christi College, the Stanford University Libraries and Cambridge University Library, to produce a high-resolution digital copy of every imageable page of most manuscripts in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College. The project was generously supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Grants were also received from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

The Parker Library's holdings of Old English texts account for a substantial proportion of all extant manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon. A total of 559 manuscripts dating from the 6th century were scanned; all image files and detailed bibliographic metadata for the objects are preserved in the SDR.

Monterey Jazz Festival
The Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound is home to the Monterey Jazz Festival (MJF) collection, containing thousands of hours of audio and video recordings from the world’s longest running jazz festival and one of the region's major cultural events. Between 2005-2008, Stanford Libraries digitally reformatted and created detailed descriptions of the recordings in order to preserve and enhance access to the material. Funding for the project was provided by Save America’s Treasures, the GRAMMY Foundation, and the National Historic Publications and Records Commission. Access to the collection database is available from the MJF collection web site and recordings can be accessed at the Archive of Recorded Sound on the Stanford campus. The master files and associated descriptive information are managed for the long-term in the SDR.

The SDR preserves digital resources collected and made available for use by the Stanford academic community, now and into the future. The community falls into three broad categories:

Stanford faculty, researchers, students
The SDR offers archiving and repository services to Stanford faculty, researchers, students as well as academic departments and other groups who produce digital resources of enduring value. These are unlikely to be preserved elsewhere, and are increasingly born-digital. For instance, Stanford Electronic Theses and Dissertations forms a collection of content unique to Stanford that is managed by the SDR.

Institutions and scholars around the world
Stanford Digital Libraries (SUL) collaborates broadly with other research institutions in the development of digital library collections and supporting applications and services. Examples of these collaborations include Parker Library on the Web and the National Geospatial Digital Archive. By providing preservation services for these digital library activities, SDR's reach extends beyond Stanford to institutions and scholars around the world.

Users of SUL's digital collections
The SDR also preserves library collections, including:

• Digitized books, manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings, videos and films: created by SUL through analog-to-digital reformatting projects in an effort to enhance access to content as well as to preserve information in obsolete formats or in poor physical condition.
• Digital resources acquired by SUL, through purchase or donation, as part of archival collections. These are unlikely to be preserved elsewhere, and are increasingly “born-digital”, having no physical counterpart.
• Commercially-available digital resources: Purchased or licensed content that, under agreement terms, may be preserved by Stanford for future use.

In May 2006 the Stanford University Provost convened the Faculty Advisory Board, an academic advisory board for digital archiving at Stanford through the Stanford Digital Repository. The FAB reported to the University Librarian with collateral reporting to the Provost. The FAB Charter was to represent the diverse fields, schools and departments of the Stanford faculty, and from this perspective, to help develop, review, and advise on:

• University policy on preservation of Stanford's digital assets;
• Services and functions of the Stanford Digital Repository, to assure alignment and satisfaction of the needs of Stanford faculty; and
• Operations of the Stanford Digital Repository, through review and oversight of appropriate third party audits.

Members of the SDR FAB were:

    Russ Altman (Chair), Department of Bioengineering, School of Medicine
    Karen Cook, Department of Sociology
    Shelley Goldman, School of Education
    Roland Horne, Department of Energy Resources Engineering, School of Earth Sciences
    Michael Shanks, Classics Department
    Fred Turner, Department of Communication
    Erika Wayne, Crown Library, Stanford Law School
    Jennifer Widom, Department of Computer Science

Throughout 2006 the FAB met to deliberate over a range of interrelated topics. The group produced a document detailing a primary role of the SDR. It opens: "The Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) serves as the Institutional Repository (IR) for the University. As such, it preserves the electronic products of research and teaching activities at Stanford. The advantages offered by this service are three-fold:

• Serving the faculty by preserving their digital content centrally, in a more effective and efficient manner than is possible at an individual level;
• Enabling Stanford researchers to meet external funders’ requirements for archiving digital work products;
• Building, over time, an asset of long-term research value to the institution."

A primary focus of the document concerns access policies to archived digital content. This report is available for download: SDR_FAB_report.pdf.

A summary of the FAB activities were presented to the Senate Committee on Libraries; the slides are available for download: SDR_FAB_for_CLib.ppt.pdf.

The need for a digital preservation system and program at Stanford University Libraries (SUL) was identified as early as 1997, on the heels of the release of the generative publication, “Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information” (Research Libraries Group and The Commission on Preservation and Access, 1996). The first prototype repository system was developed in 2003-04, and the first SDR staff member was hired in early 2004. In that same year, with a grant from National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program's (NDIIPP) first round of funding, the SDR engaged with real-world preservation challenges in the Archive Ingest and Handling Test, and in so doing, established a prominent position in the emerging digital preservation community.

With a second NDIIPP grant supporting the establishment of the National Geospatial Digital Archive, the prototype system was redesigned in 2005-06. Version 1.0 of the Stanford Digital Repository went into production in December 2006.

Within three years, the first generation SDR grew to contain over 30,000 digital objects -- equaling nearly 80 Terabytes of unique content -- from dozens of library collections, including books, images, audiovisual materials, manuscripts, and GIS data.

Motivated by growth in SUL’s overall digital library systems and services and the need for greater flexibility and scalability, a major repository redesign and development effort was undertaken in 2010. SDR 2.0 was released into production in November 2010, and is the ongoing focus of continued technical and service development. As of Spring 2012, SDR 2.0 houses nearly 250,000 objects and grows at a steady rate. (The previous system, SDR 1.7, remains operational while plans to migrate its contents to SDR 2.0 are underway.)

The SDR has matured along a similar time line as LOCKSS, SUL’s other major digital preservation initiative.