Blog topic: Digitization

The San Francisco History Expo is this weekend (March 1-2, 2014) at the Old Mint. Some very early video footage from the Ampex Corp collection at Stanford will be on view there.

This footage -- preserved through the state-wide California Audiovisual Preservation Project -- is special because it demonstrates Ampex's first portable video recorder, the VR-3000. It depicts scenes recorded on a San Francisco cable car going steeply down (probably) California Street in 1967!

By Astrid J. Smith and Wayne Vanderkuil.
An object associated with demure and lady-like behavior, the captions underneath each detailed etched vignette on this 1797 fan are surprisingly wry, witty, and thought provoking. Once commonplace, no self-respecting Georgian era lady would be without such an object. As Leah Marie Brown states, “Fans were must-have accoutrements for ladies of 18th century. They were used to perform multiple functions: They could offer a gentle breeze in an overheated room, allow the user to spy on people behind her (some fans had small mirrors on their sticks), conceal gossiping lips, and convey a secret (or not so secret) message.”
See how Digital Production Group went about imaging this unique ladies' fan.

The recent digitization of cassettes from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research was a reminder of the wide range of collection sizes preserved by SMPL. This entry will give a brief description of why this collection is interesting and how it relates to the multiple workflows of the Stanford Media Preservation Lab.