Welcome to Bibliopedia
Current Projects
We are currently testing and refining Bibliopedia in collaboration with two major research projects at Stanford:
Summary
For Researchers
Bibliopedia provides a platform for organizing, visualizing, sharing, and searching archives without the need for scholars to become experts in metadata or data visualization. It transforms materials into visualized networks to provide new insights into their structure and context. Bibliopedia allows scholars to collaborate on the elaboration and improvement of these materials, is useful for active research, and serves as a gateway to long-term preservation and dissemination.
For Librarians and Technologists
Bibliopedia’s main technical innovation is the melding of the needs of researchers with those of librarians and technologists through open source software, standardized yet flexible metadata descriptions, and existing and emerging technologies that include Linked Open Data and data visualizations. Bibliopedia ensures that research and cultural heritage materials are available to the widest possible audiences, for long-term preservation, and for creative combinations with other resources.
Details
Despite great interest from researchers, librarians, cultural heritage institutions, and the general public in digital and digitized research materials, there exists no platform that addresses the various needs of these groups. Bibliopedia helps scholars make sense of their materials while making it straight-forward for librarians to preserve and index these materials.
Researchers need a tool that allows them easily to organize and analyze their research material, either as individual scholars or with a team of colleagues and students. These forms of analysis include search, tagging, and data visualization, all of which Bibliopedia makes possible. Faculty also wish to share their research materials in a secure, copyright-aware way with peers at other institutions and with their students. Bibliopedia defines numerous tiered levels of access for materials that guarantee that researchers can share sensitive materials while making their publicly accessible items available for general use in research and teaching.
Academic librarians encourage faculty to consider issues of long-term preservation and interoperability, but often lack the time or resources to ensure that each faculty-led research project implements best practices from the project’s inception. Bibliopedia automatically encodes research materials with well-known metadata schemata, making those materials more quickly ingestible into library systems for search and preservation. Bibliopedia also connects individual items within a larger network of materials, thereby contextualizing materials in new and unexpected ways.
There is also great interest in making materials re-usable for federated searches such as those made possible by the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana. Although the methods to ensure such interoperability and re-usability are well understood by technologists and librarians, researchers rarely have the necessary expertise. Bibliopedia makes research available for these and other forms of search, re-use, and transformation by providing programmatic access to materials in standard formats.
Bibliopedia is an open source, generalizable platform available to all researchers, libraries, and other institutions. It leverages Stanford University Libraries’ expertise and Stanford University research projects to develop a broadly useful, freely-shared tool that enhances digital scholarship by making it easier to share, analyze, and preserve the fruits of research.
Team
Michael Widner, Project Director and Co-Creator
Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, Stanford University LibrariesJason Yandell, Co-Creator
Claudia Engel, Technical Lead for Market Street Chinatown
Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, Stanford University LibrariesJason Heppler, Technical Lead for Chinese Railroad Workers
Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, Stanford University LibrariesErin Fahy, Systems Administrator
Digital Library Systems and Services, Stanford University LibrariesAdvisory Board
Gordon Chang
Principal Investigator, Chinese Railroad Workers in North AmericaProfessor of History. Stanford University
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Principal Investigator, Chinese Railroad Workers in North AmericaProfessor of English. Stanford University
Geraldine Heng
Associate Professor of English. The University of Texas at AustinBarbara Voss
Principal Investigator, Market Street ChinatownAssociate Professor of Anthropology. Stanford University.
Gabriel Wolfenstein
Project Manager, Chinese Railroad Workers in North AmericaCenter for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Stanford University.
