Contributors to this issue are: Cathy Aster, Peter Chan, Nicole Coleman, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, and Annie Schweikert. Thanks to our many collaborators!
The Stanford RegLab and the Stanford Literary Lab have both been processing and analyzing large text corpora for many years now and both recently received a chunk of OCR content from Stanford Libraries thanks to work that DLSS has undertaken to retrieve the digital files of more than 3 million items from the Stanford Libraries catalog that were scanned by Google.
This month Stanford Libraries is launching a collaborative project to expand access to our extensive holdings of American dime novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dime novels, which flourished in the United States in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, featured an ever-evolving array of popular fiction genres: frontier stories modeled on the work of James Fenimore Cooper, detective stories, westerns, romances, sports stories. Widely read in their day, dime novels provided cheap fiction for an expanding reading public. Today, many dime novels are in particularly fragile condition due to the cheap nature of the paper used in their production, and collections are spread across the country with few institutions holding complete runs of major dime novel series.
The COVID-19 pandemic poses many challenges to libraries, including the accessibility of physical materials in support of teaching and learning. In a more typical quarter, faculty would place books on reserve, so that students could come to the library and check them out for a designated window of study. With most students off campus for remote instruction, colleagues across the library have adapted to the new remote learning conditions of the pandemic in a variety of ways.
In recent years, Prof. Elizabeth Kessler’s American Studies course, “StarStuff: Space and the American Imagination,” brought students into our Special Collections Barchas Room for hands-on viewings of antiquarian astronomy texts, 19th century lithographs and planispheres, scientific literature, and contemporary fine art photography.
Welcome! As summer draws to a close, it's time to highlight hot news in digital library services.
Featuring contributions from: Cathy Aster, Hannah Frost, Dinah Handel, Amy Hodge, Michael Olson, and Sarah Seestone.
Buckminster Fuller has loomed large over the Stanford Media Preservation Lab ever since his archives were fully processed and described in the mid-2000s. Over the past eight years we've been slowly reformatting the extensive media component of this collection, but there was one media format that remained elusive: wire.
This guest blog was written by Natasha Porfirenko, PhD. Natasha is a long-standing and valued contributor to Stanford’s Special Collections for her expertise in Slavic and Eastern European materials. Her work in Special Collections has included processing a large volume of Slavic and Eastern European letters, postcards, objects, and ephemera preserved in Stanford’s archives of material from the committee to free Angela Davis. She is currently hard at work delving into the descriptive metadata of tapes depicting works of famous Soviet choreographer, Leonid Yakobson.