In the beginning of March, managers at Stanford Libraries began talking about working remotely and decided to set up shifts in each department – half working two weeks on site and half two weeks remotely. By the 6th of March the teams for our Collection Services group out in Redwood City were assembled, and the first group – Aries – stayed home for their first week. The Libraries were only one week into that first shift, when the state of California and Stanford decided that everyone should shelter at home starting on the 16th. The Aries team was taken off guard - we all were. Although we had discussed and lined up remote projects, not everyone had taken their computer and ergonomic equipment home with them. A few of us went in to grab equipment (desktop computers, monitors, etc.) and forgotten items (like reading glasses!) and drove around making deliveries – not everyone in the Bay Area drives a car!
At the VALA2020 conference on Libraries and Technology last month I stated, as I have in numerous other presentations, reports, and recommendations, that implementations of technology (and I am usually speaking about AI) in libraries should reflect the ethos of the library. I say this not because the ethos of the library is correct, just, or even well-defined; but it is something to which we who work in libraries can be held accountable.
Stanford Libraries hosted the 2nd International Conference on AI for Libraries, Archives, and Museums December 4-6, 2019. Visit the website fantasticfutures.stanford.edu for recordings of the talks mentioned below.
Monday, March 4, 2019 from 4:00 pm - 5:30 in the Bender Room at Green Library, Peggy Phelan and Maneesh Agrawala will join the library's digital research architect, Nicole Coleman to discuss the
Andy Warhol Photography Archive, Contact Sheets: 1976 - 1987 and how technology is changing our relationship with media.
On Tuesday, February 5, in the Bender Room at Green Library, Jessica Riskin and Oussama Khatib will join Nicole Coleman in conversation about robotics past and future. Both have been thinking deeply about artificial life and artificial intelligence throughout their careers. While Khatib has been building robots and breaking new ground in human-robot collaboration, Riskin’s work explores the way that early automatons influenced the mechanistic view of mind and body, evolution and inheritance, and how our relationship to machines continues to influence our thinking today about whether human beings have agency in shaping their destiny.
Occasionally I review the analytics for content published via the Stanford Digital Repository to see what is currently trending. Upon returning to my Lathrop desk in January after the recent winter break, I checked in and discovered that a dissertation submitted last month by student Danqi Chen had enjoyed a whopping 2,736 pageviews in just four weeks since it was published on December 11, 2018. That is an extraordinarily impressive number!
