Special Collections and University Archives

Stanford University Libraries Department of Special Collections and University Archives is pleased to announce a new up to date guide to the LGBT Community Resources Center and its predecessors, the Gay People's Union (GPU), and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at Stanford (GLAS).

Included are correspondence, memoranda, office files, reference files on service organizations in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, notebooks, audiovisual materials, photographs, posters, and ephemera pertaining to the gay, lesbian, and transgender community at Stanford and the surrounding communities.

Call number: SC0252

Finding Aid: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8t1nf7c8/

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.

This year's Winter Closure dates are Monday, December 24, 2012 through Friday, January 4, 2013. Special Collections will reopen for business as usual on Monday, January 7, 2013.

Happy Holidays from Special Collections!

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)