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Lacuna, a digital reading, writing, and annotation platform I developed, is now in use as part of a MOOC being run at Dartmouth University. An author for their EdTech blog recently wrote up the experience. Here's my favorite part of the post:

The AmRenX team is using YellowDig and Lacuna Stories to encourage engagement in Dartmouth’s first literature MOOC. YellowDig has been a different platform for some seasoned edX learners, but they have really taken to Lacuna. To date 542 learners have made 6,930 annotations in AmRenX. There is more activity in the annotation platform than any other part of the course.

For more, including animated GIFs of the platform in action, read the full post.

screenshot from Exploring the Canadian Political Interest Group and Political Parties Web Sphere

Since our collaboration with political science researchers using web archives to understand the 2014 U.S. congressional elections, we've seen (and, hopefully, helped foster) growing interest in web archives as primary source material. This trend parallels a similar refocusing by other web archiving programs toward enhancing access services and facilitating research use. The maturity and the variety of these efforts, as well as the accumulating body of resulting research, provide an expanding list of references with which to orient and entice prospective researchers to the potential of working with web archives.

Porgy and Bess: A Jazz Transcription - CD cover

The producers of Riverwalk Jazz, the popular public radio program dedicated to presenting, preserving and promoting classic jazz, recently issued their acclaimed live production of “Porgy and Bess: A Jazz Transcription” on CD.  The original program masters, recorded in 1992 on analog quarter-inch tape, were paged from the Riverwalk Jazz collection held by the Archive of Recorded Sound and digitized at the Stanford Media Preservation Lab for the release.

From January 25th to 29th, we hosted Geo4LibCamp 2016 at the Hartley Conference Center and Branner Library. Inspired by the success of LDCX 2015, this inaugural event was planned as a hands-on meeting to bring together those building digital repository and associated services for geospatial data. We wanted to focus on sharing best practices, solving common problems, and addressing technical issues.

Kris Kasianovitz & Regina Roberts at the C+J Symposium 2015

By Regina L. Roberts & Kris Kasianovitz

Did you know that Stanford University Libraries (SUL) librarians and staff are able to deposit articles, presentations, posters and other content they produce in the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR)?  The Stanford University Libraries Staff Publications and Research Collection contains “publications and research produced and contributed by staff of Stanford University Libraries on a broad range of topics relevant to academic and research libraries”. 

#ethics @ #webarc15

A welcome complement to the lately growing number of web archiving-specific events, the inaugural Web Archives: Capture, Curate, Analyze conference (tweet stream) brought together an eclectic crowd of researchers, instructors, students, archivists, librarians, developers, and others interested in web archiving. A novel mixture of institutions was also represented - some active principally through IIPC, many more associated with the SAA Web Archiving Roundtable and/or Archive-It Partner communities, and still others who I'd not yet encountered in these more established, practitioner-centric fora.

Echoing the sentiments of other participants, I was impressed and inspired both by the diversity of perspectives and the excitement for moving web archiving forward. As befitting such a group, the schedule and hallway conversations crossed a wide array of topics. Running through it all, though, questions of ethics seemed to be a persistent subject. I'll highlight three areas of ethical concern that stood out for me.

SearchWorks

You may have noticed some changes in SearchWorks over the past several weeks. We've been working on a list of features prioritized by the SearchWorks Steering Committee and user feedback: new Requests forms, a Government Documents access point, better discovery and display of digital content, new items feed, and more email options.

Here's an end-of-year wrap-up and a look at what's still to come in 2016.

logo graphic appearing on the "WorldWideWeb SLAC Home Page" in 1993

The world's first websites were built for very different rendering and navigation interfaces than the comparatively advanced browsers available today. Thanks to the work of web archivists (e.g., CERN, SLAC), we can celebrate the incongruity of accessing some of these ancient websites using modern browsers. While a traditional goal of web archiving has been to preserve the "canonical" user experience of a website, this has been persistently impaired by (among other challenges) accessing web archives using software other than would've been available at the time content was archived.

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