Calling all Artists! The Stanford Libraries #ColorOurCollection2023 digital coloring book is here. Get creative and put your personal spin on thirteen exemplary images from our collection. Organized by the New York Academy of Medicine, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions from across the world have turned their most compelling images into free downloadable coloring books.
Attention all artists and coloring book enthusiasts! The Stanford Libraries 2022 #Color our Collections coloring book is here. Culled from digitized images from Stanford Digital Repository, the coloring book consists of 14 sheets that highlight an eclectic range of subjects and styles from our collection.
When campuses across the world shut down their physical spaces in March 2020, lecture series were canceled or moved to Zoom, where many of them remain to this day. Speakers and attendees learned how to manage the gaze of the webcam with carefully curated spaces in their homes, virtual backgrounds, special lighting, or reducing their presence to a simple black square.
When Parker on the Web 2.0 launched in 2018, it was the culmination of a long-term development plan to host an international collaborative project on sustainable infrastructure at no cost to the user. The engineering effort was immense, and that effort paid off: we saw a nearly 10-fold increase in visitors to the site, and the incorporation of IIIF functionality to the Parker manuscript content allowed the digital objects to be used in a myriad of new projects, from AI-driven initiatives like handwritten text recognition and feature recognition, to crowdsourcing transcription projects, and aggregation and reuse across multiple platforms. While Parker 2.0 was a technical success, the intellectual content of the site - the painstakingly-crafted descriptive metadata produced in the late 2000s that drove Parker on the Web 1.0 - was not fully added to the new platform. Thanks to the encouragement of dedicated Parker on the Web users and scholars, we were able to prioritize a large-scale reassessment of the project descriptive metadata, identify gaps, and restore the manuscript descriptions to their full glory - improving the discovery functionality for the site and providing users with rich descriptions for every manuscript in the collection. Parker on the Web 2.1, released on March 3, 2021, finally completes the migration of the project from a stand-alone site built on bespoke software and using a customized and unique metadata structure to a sustainable and extensible collaboration built on open source software and common metadata standards.
While sheltering in place, the Rare Books Division of Special Collections has been working with colleagues around the country to produce content related to our collections or using technologies that allow sharing digital images across institutions. Here are three recent webinars from that effort:
... we found ourselves revisiting The Annunciate Virgin. Kathy's love of the piece was contagious, and we began to entertain the thought that maybe, just maybe, we would actually buy a wooden panel painting. -- T. Robert Burke
Eight new digital collections are now available in SearchWorks. These collections take advantage of SearchWorks' ability to provide users with rich discovery and access capabilities for finding and working with digital collection content.
Medieval fragments study collection, 11th-16th cent
Abstract: Primarily fragments, these specimens were acquired to demonstrate the development of writing in the western world. A variety of scripts are represented, from Carolingian minuscule to the humanistic hands and the "cancelleresca."
Collection contact: Benjamin Albritton
In January, Stanford launched Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts, an online learning experience devoted to the technologies involved in creating and interpreting medieval manuscripts. We're off to a roaring start with thousands of enrolled participants across more than 90 countries (and it's not too late to sign up!). The creation of the course has been a truly collaborative experience: Stanford University faculty and library staff have worked closely with counterparts at Cambridge University, Stanford Academic Technology Specialists, graduate students, and a team from Stanford's Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning to produce a suite of learning materials that have become much richer than any of us envisaged at the beginning of the process in 2013!