Blog topic: Digitization
Sanborn fire insurance map collection online
Sanborn maps are a favorite of any map librarian. What's not to like about them? They give us a view into the history of our country in a way that few other maps do. They show the growth and decline of towns and cities. They track the changing use of buildings over time. At times they tell us who lived and worked in specific areas. We peek into the past to understand what kept people entertained, be it an amusement park, a skating rink, a movie theater, or a bar. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Company began producing these maps in the late 19th century for towns and cities throughout the United States in order to provide information to insurers about the composition and use of buildings to allow for the correct underwriting of policies. The maps include: building footprints; building material shown by color, height and number of stories; uses such as dwellings, hotels, churches, and chicken coops; street widths, water pipes, hydrants, and cisterns. This provides historians, genealogists, urban planners, and ethnologist with a wealth of information about the nation's past.
The Stanford Libraries now supports cylinder preservation
The Stanford Media Preservation Lab now supports cylinder transfers! With support from the Archive of Recorded Sound, SUL Tech Support, and Digital Library Systems and Services, SMPL was able to purchase an Endpoint Audio cylinder player.
Piano roll scanner update
The Stanford piano roll scanner has progressed from a prototype to a functional, production level machine since the last report in spring of 2017. As reported earlier, the scanner is based on a design by Anthony Robinson, a piano roll expert in England.
Founding Grant now online
The Archives is pleased to announce that the original copy of the Founding Grant is now available online: https://purl.stanford.edu/rb803rc6397. Although previously available in other formats, this is the first time that this one of a kind treasure, now preserved in the Archives, is available in all of its glory.
Digital library services news - fall 2018
New digital project proposal form
Warm welcome to Laura Wilsey who joins our team in October
I am very pleased to announce the hire of Laura Wilsey as our new Cataloging and Metadata Librarian for incoming collections. She will work primarily out of our Stanford Redwood City but will travel to campus as needed as she takes over responsibility for managing metadata for our many complex digitization projects in collaboration with staff from the Metadata Development Unit and DLSS, as well as curators and subject specialists.
Mystery in the stacks: Dating a rare Chinese Buddhist book in the Gunst Collection
I was very interested when recently a colleague from Green Library, David Jordan, alerted me to the existence of several Chinese and Japanese items within the Gunst Collection, also known as the Morgan A. and Aline D. Gunst Memorial Library of the Book Arts. As the name suggests, this collection, which was donated to Stanford Libaries in 1963 and contains over four thousand volumes, is devoted to works that showcase the role of books as artifacts. As I was browsing through the short list of East Asian materials belonging to this collection, I was intrigued by one item in particular, which was described as an eleventh-century print of a Chinese Buddhist scripture.