gedwards@stanford.edu's blog

We are excited to announce that 187 posters from the STOP AIDS Project records have been digitized, accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository and are now available online via the collection's finding aid.

Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections was interviewed by Trever Owens at the Library of Congress about a current project on preserving software from the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing. Stanford University Libraries are collaborating with NIST’s National Software Reference Library to create disk images and digitize related materials for a large portion of the collection.

Read full interview here.

Since its inception in the early 1970s, email has become a durable form of communication – one that presents a massive problem for donors, repositories, and researchers. Over 140 billion email messages are sent every day, and many, if not all have research value as part of an archival collection. Email is used for more than just communication. It is used for collaboration, planning, sharing, conducting transactions, and as an aid to memory – a self-archive. It documents relationships – personal, business, and communal. Our reliance on and daily use of email over the past 40 years has developed rich archival material with a secondary benefit of recording social networks in the header information of senders and recipients.

The Department of Special Collections at SUL proposes to address important facets of stewarding email archives that have not been tackled in previous projects. Characteristics of email such as its relatively stable format standardization as well as the inherent structure itself – header, body, attachments – make email an ideal candidate for automated tools to support archival workflows, such as appraisal and processing, as well as benefitting the user through discovery and delivery.

William McDonough is one of the superstars of the environmental movement. Time magazine heralded him as a "Hero for the Planet" in 1999. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development in a 1996 White House ceremony. McDonough is the only individual to receive the award, the nation's top environmental honor. Now the man who has been called the leading environmental architect of our time will be donating his extensive archive and professional papers to Stanford University Libraries. (Read more)

At the beginning of this year, the papers of Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, were given to SUL’s Dept. of Special Collections. Funding for the first year has been set to begin processing this complex collection. We are happy to announce that Laura Williams has been hired as the project archivist and Christy Smith as the processing assistant. Laura, who has been with the Manuscript’s Division since 2009, is just wrapping up the processing of the Stop AIDS Project Records – another large processing and digitization project. Christy Smith has been in the department since 2000, staring as an assistant to the previous University Archivist, Maggie Kimball. In 2009 she moved to the manuscripts division as a processing assistant on the R. Stuart Hummel Family Papers processing and digitization project.

In June, I gave a talk at the Rare Books and Manuscripts conference in San Diego, California. The topic was about archiving and processing email collections and I was paired with two individuals from the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. This was great for me, as the center collects and preserves experimental film archives, which we also collect. At the conclusion, we had as many questions for each other as the audience did for us. [Note: The accompanying PPT slides are available online.]

Here is the gist of my email presentation:

The Enigma of Email

Image from the 18th century Lutherie (L'Encyclopédie by Diderot and D'Alembert),
Arthur Benade Papers, Series 3 in Musical Acoustics Research Library (MARL) collection, M1711.

Today is the Day of Digital Archives and coincidentally the first in a series of four workshops created and run by Peter Chan, our resident Digital Archivist on accessioning and processing born-digital materials. This is the beginning of our digital life post-AIMS in Special Collections. Most of the attendees today are staff from Manuscripts and University Archives who will be engaged in actively capturing (part of the accessioning process) and processing born-digital content from our collections. One of these collections is the records of the Stop Aids Project discussed in a previous entry.

Carleen Maley Hutchins (1911-2009), born in Springfield, Massachusetts, was not your typical woman of the early 1900s. In school she chose woodworking over home economics, and trumpet over piano. After getting a degree in Biology, she taught science at the Brearley School in New York. There she was invited to participate in faculty chamber music gatherings, but as her colleagues considered her trumpet to be “too loud” they encouraged her to take up the viola. She purchased a cheap viola and was soon dissatisfied with the instrument’s limitations.

Jay Haley (1923-2007), was a seminal figure in the field of psychotherapy, a pioneer in the development of family therapy and a founder of the first journal in the field, Family Process which he edited for ten years. His views on human behavior were profoundly shaped by his work with such leading figures in psychotherapy as Gregory Bateson and Milton H. Erickson. The approach Haley developed grew out of his work with Erickson and is known as strategic or directive therapy, one of the most effective models of problem-solving.