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Six new digital collections are now available in SearchWorks. These new collections were all created using SDR Online Deposit and take advantage of SearchWorks' ability to provide users with rich discovery and access capabilities for finding and working with digital collection content.

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Department of English

Collection consists of 4 undergraduate honors theses from the Department of English, 2014.

Collection Contact: Kenneth Ligda, English ATS

Five new digital collections are now available in SearchWorks. These new collections take advantage of SearchWorks' ability to provide users with rich discovery and access capabilities for finding and working with digital collection content.

Marge Frantz lectures on McCarthyism, 2003 

The materials consist of videorecordings of lectures on McCarthyism by Marge Frantz. Lectures were part of an anthropology class taught by Dr. S. Lochlann Jain.

Collection Contact: Daniel Hartwig

Professor John Willinsky

John Willinsky waited for a couple of weeks after the fall quarter had started to give the Graduate School of Education (GSE) faculty and students some time to settle in to their routines before sending out the big news:

While reading Sybil Schaefer's interview "We're All Digital Archivists Now," I was happy to see the following comment "we don’t all need to be digital archivists, but we do need to be archivists who work with digital materials. It’s not scalable to have one person, or one team, focus on the 'digital stuff.'"  

I heartily agree with her statement. Since our involvement in the AIMS project, we have required that project archivists process both the analog and digital portions of a collection. And yet, it is apparent that there is a very important role for a digital archivist. Someone who will keep up with new tools and automated processing methods, be on hand to train these project archivists, support acquisition (curators, subject specialists, donors) and explore and assist with our efforts across a wide spectrum of new projects.

If you are interested in some of the details regarding the activities and functions of SUL's digital archivist, please read Peter Chan's recent article - "What Does it Take to Be a Well-rounded Digital Archivist?

 

A new and exciting addition to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) is the data behind the City Nature project. This innovative project combines methodologies from the digital humanities and spatial analysis fields to explore urban nature. Project PIs are Jon Christensen and Michael Kahan with development work by both Karl Grossner and Elijah Meeks.

The Stanford University Libaries is one of the founding partners of the International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io), which aims to enable broad access to cultural heritage images on the web. This exciting initiative is in its fifth year and is beginning to have an impact on the way digital images are used to support research and teaching.  The IIIF editors recently released version 2.0 the IIIF API's, which is a major step towards creating a stable and sustainable technology framework for image interoperability.   

To celebrate this progress, the IIIF community is hosting a one day information sharing event at the British Library about the use of images in and across cultural heritage institutions.  The day will focus on how museums, galleries, libraries and archives, or any online image service, can take advantage of a powerful technical framework for interoperability between image repositories.   This event will be valuable for organizational decision makers, repository and collection managers, software engineers, and anyone interested in exploring the wide range of use cases that are seamlessly enabled by the framework.  

Attendance is free, and widespread dissemination of the event is encouraged.

A detailed program is available at http://iiif.io/event/2014/london.html and those interested can register to attend at http://bit.ly/iiiflondon2014.

 

Dr. Rob Sanderson

In a move that will have a profound and long-lasting impact on the library sector, the W3C officially chartered a new working group on Web Annotation on August 20, 2014. Stanford Libraries staff member, Rob Sanderson, will serve as the working group's inaugural co-chair. 

The W3C is the standards body that guides the development of the Web, and has had a longstanding Open Annotation Community Group focused on how to annotate digital resources on the Web. As a newly chartered working group, the output of these discussions can now be channeled into official W3C recommendations, and baked into fabric of the Web itself.  

As library content and services become increasingly digital, the ability to annotate it--provide commentary, analysis, reviews, transcription, description, links and more--is increasingly a concern. By helping define a standard approach to annotation (in the broadest sense) of web resources, libraries can help fulfill their traditional mission of supporting research, scholarly communication and the diffusion of knowledge in the 21st century. And by working deeply in standards efforts like those of the W3C, libraries can help ensure their technologies and services are integral to and leverage the latest information technologies, instead of competing with them or lagging behind. 

Dr. Sanderson, who joined Stanford Libraries in April of 2014, brings extensive experience in annotations to the W3C and Stanford. He was one of the principal investigators of the Open Annotation Collaboration, a precursor to the W3C community group, where he also served as co-chair and a driving force. In recognition of his ongoing contributions and position within the community, Dr. Sanderson is serving as one of the co-chairs of the Working Group, which is a boon for the W3C, for Stanford, and for the future of annotation on the Web. 

Yesterday, (Sunday, September 7, 2014), SearchWorks 3.0 was released. This marks a near-complete rewrite of the SearchWorks application, and the first major update to the look and feel of SearchWorks in four years. With the new release come numerous enhancements to the Stanford Libraries' catalog. Highlights of the new features include...

Mobile-friendly

The new SearchWorks interface is optimized for any size screen--from phone to tablet to laptop to cinema-sized display. Fonts and line spacing have been enhanced to work for touch navigation on small screens, and "jump to" links and expandable menus have been added in key places to assist with navigation for users on any device. 

Search results 

Search results pages now feature more information, and more actionable information, to help patrons accomplish key tasks more quickly. An expandable panel reveals summary information with a single click, letting users browse more easily across large result sets. Brief location information is available at a glance, and detailed information (including location, call number, availability and request links when applicable) with a single click.  

Gallery view & Brief view

In addition to the normal view, search results now also include an updated "gallery view" (for a page of thumbnail images) and "brief view" (for a concise list of titles, call numbers and locations). Each of these presents an expandable "preview" pane that provides more information on any item with a single click--all without leaving the search results screen. 

Detailed record view

The detailed record view has been dramatically updated, and factors in several years of user feedback and usability study. The record view has been reduced to a simpler two-column layout with a logical information flow; jump-to links make it easy to navigate very long records. The display of item location (with request links, where applicable) has been streamlined, and location information now links to each holding library's web page on the Stanford Libraries website, along with Today's Hours (also powered by the library website). 

Browse related items

For several years, one of SearchWorks' key features has been the ability to "browse by call number", and view similarly classified items regardless of where they are physically shelved. This feature was often overlooked, however, as it was tucked into the left-most corner of the detailed record view. With SearchWorks 3.0, this information is now prominently displayed at the bottom of each record page with a scrolling film strip.

Integration with the Library website

Integrating the information and services from the Libraries' website with SearchWorks was a major design objective. In addition to crosslinking library web pages and hours (see above), patrons can now open up a "chat with a librarian" session when offering feedback, or if they hit zero search results. The main navigation of Library.stanford.edu is available from an expandable menu in SearchWorks' top menu. 

Digital collections

Digital collections have a much improved display in SearchWorks, reflecting SUL's rapidly growing materials in this space. In addition to being able to browse across all digital collections easily, viewing collection details and searching within a collection is now easier and richer than ever. See the Bob Fitch photo archive record or search within it, for examples. 

New "resource type" and "media type" facets

The "format" facet in the previous version of SearchWorks had a somewhat uneven mix of resource types (e..g., "image"), media type (e.g., "microformats") and genre (e.g., "thesis"), including less than helpful or antiquated categories, like "other" and "computer file". The new SearchWorks now breaks these into different facet families: Resource Type features human-friendly categories for items by which patrons might typically search (book, dataset, image, map, newspaper, etc.) while Media Type indicates the physical container of the object (microfilm, DVD, CD, Blu-Ray, etc.). 

Advanced Search

The Advanced Search page has been simplified, with updated instructions on power search techniques (AND, +, truncation and wildcarding, e.g.)

Zero results page

When searches can't find any matches, the zero results page now offers suggested alternate searches that might have some results, as well as helpful links to other sources, such as WorldCat or "Chat with a Librarian". 

In addition to all of the above, there are numerous other features and enhancements throughout the application. The redesign also positions SearchWorks to add new functionality in the future, including more "browse" views, article / finding aid / website search, and augmenting records with more data.

The redevelopment effort also had the happy effect of reducing the total amount of code in SearchWorks, increasing the test coverage and number of team members capable of contributing to SearchWorks, increasing the amount of shared code with Blacklight (the open source application on which SearchWorks is based).

The SearchWorks team will continue to make enhancements and monitor feedback related to the release over the coming weeks and months. 

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