Blog topic: Stanford Digital Repository

As the CLIR postdoctoral fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford I work primarily with data about large collections of digitized manuscripts and fragments. For example, I have helped to make our teaching collections more easily discoverable in Searchworks. I've also been bringing together partner institutions' descriptive metadata to feed a specialized manuscript search environment. 

In practice, I write code to transform batches of 70, 300, 500, or 1000+ manuscripts at a time: I've gotten very comfortable thinking of medieval manuscripts in the tens, hundreds, and even thousands. But the truth is that these large batches of digital-medieval manuscripts I curate are built of unique, single objects. Single objects that, just like the physical objects they grow from, are made by individual people, in particular environments, under specific institutional, financial, and social pressures. 

In order to better understand the process that leads to the creation of a digital-medieval book, I recently followed the digitization of a fifteenth-century book of hours, Stanford University Libraries, M0379, from the request for digitization, through the slow hard work of taking the images and hours of post-production labor, to its arrival in Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). 

Calling all SUL staff! Have you recently published an article or presented a conference paper or poster that you'd like to archive and share? Perhaps you have some research or a project report relevant to our field that needs a permanent home? Don't forget that as vital members of the Stanford community, the Stanford Digital Repository is available to you, too. In fact, we set up the Stanford University Libraries Staff Publications and Research Collection specifically for this purpose. 

Six new digital collections are now available in SearchWorks. These new collections were all created using SDR Online Deposit and take advantage of SearchWorks' ability to provide users with rich discovery and access capabilities for finding and working with digital collection content.

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Department of English

Collection consists of 4 undergraduate honors theses from the Department of English, 2014.

Collection Contact: Kenneth Ligda, English ATS