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Delineatio Omnium Orarum Totius Australis Partis Americae, Dictae Peruvianae, a R. de la Plata, Brasiliam, Pariam, & Castellam . . ..

We were recently approached by Blair Hedges, a professor of Biology at Pennsylvania State University, who requested high resolution files for over 200 maps depicting the Caribbean that were part of the Barry L Ruderman Collection for his Caribmap website.  "Caribmap is a mobile-friendly resource for exploring historical map images of Caribbean islands. The site has evolved since 1999 and now presents images of approximately 1800 maps of the islands printed over five centuries (16th–20th). This is still a small sampling of the thousands of different maps that were printed." The site includes links to resources and a bibliography.

You can see the Stanford-contributed maps here, and visit caribmap.org to view other maps of the Caribbean; you can also look at the Barry L. Ruderman Collection in more detail and browse for other maps from that collection.

We are pleased to have the maps featured on caribmap.org! Many thanks to the staff at Branner and DLSS, especially Deardra Fuzzell, Bess Sadler and Cathy Aster for their efforts in being able to use systematic methods to provide high resolution images to caribmap.org.



What do you get when you combine 14 library staff, the John A. Blume Center for Earthquake Engineering Technical Reports, the SDR self-deposit interface, and pizza? A Deposit-a-thon, of course!

A lot of valuable research done on Stanford's campus is published as part of technical reports, and as valued research output there is no better place to preserve these -- and make them easily accessible to the world -- than through the Stanford Digital Repository.

Big Game activities -- bonfire

In August, approximately 68,000, files representing nearly 600 items were accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). These materials include -- but are not limited to -- items from the correspondence from Athanasius Kircher, Stanford historical photographs, and the journal of the Gorilla Foundation.

Front cover image from the album Stanford Mendicants '65

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) has many partnerships on campus and the recent move provided a great opportunity to spend some time working in the audio room of one of those partners, the Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS). Several recordings were digitized and documented while there. Two projects completed of interest are the digitization of several recordings made by the a cappella group the Stanford Mendicants and the transfer of cassette tapes from the book and audio set: Photochemistry of Organic Molecules (POM) held by the Media & Microtext Center.

Obsolete tape cleaning equipment packed for the move

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) is making good progress in setting up shop at our new location in Redwood City. 

SMPL moved from Page Mill Road in Palo Alto -- along with HighWire Press, Stanford University Press, LOCKSS, and parts of both Preservation and Special Collections -- to 425 Broadway over Labor Day weekend. (Shortly thereafter Stanford announced plans to redevelop the Redwood City site and create a major auxiliary campus.)  We're very excited about the new space!  It provides us with several opportunities to streamline and improve our facilities, workflows and services. More about that in a future post. For now, here are some photos illustrating our progress. 

Wiki home page

Did you know the Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) has helped create an online wiki collecting and describing audio and video artifacts one might encounter in the course of reformatting legacy media? Check out our two year update on the Atlas on Indiana University's media preservation blog

Segmented Map for Vectorization Study, Stanford University Libraries

 The discovery of a particular scanning defect called Bayer moiré, occured while creating image files at Stanford University Library's Map Scanning Lab and prompted a more focused study. The Bayer moiré defect affects the ability of software to lift features from maps digitally. An analysis of findings has supported developing a better understanding of color filter array technology and some of its associated quality issues: rationales for on-demand file remediation of affected image files, options for map imaging in the future, an effective and open-source approach for vectorization, performance improvements for producing and vectorizing raster images.

An article on this study, authored by Matt Pearson, G. Salim Mohammed, Renzo Sanchez-Silva and Patricia Carbajales, which includes additional quality control measures for imaging large maps and a refinement of the topo raster image specification is now published in the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries: Advances in Geospatial Information, Collections & Archives, entitled "Stanford University Libraries Study: Topographical Map Vectorization and the Impact of Bayer Moiré Defect."  For more details please read the article.

Yung-Yidish no. 1, cover.
I'm pleased to announce that the Stanford University Libraries have digitized a complete set of the rare (and fragile) avant-garde Yiddish literary and artistic journal Yung-Idish.  All three issues were published in Lodz, 1919, and the digitized versions are found at the following URLs:
 
 
For background on the Yung-Idish (or: Yung-yidish) group, see the entry in the YIVO Encyclopediahttp://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Yung-yidish.
"The founding of Yung-yidish, the first Yiddish artistic avant-garde group in Poland, grew out of a meeting in 1918 between poet Moyshe Broderzon and a group of visual artists centered around Yitskhok Broyner, Yankl Adler, and Marek Szwarc. Eventually, the group included some 20-odd members including Yitsḥak Katzenelson, Yekhezkl-Moyshe Nayman, and Hershele, as well as younger people discovered by the group, such as the artist Henekh Bartshinski and the writers Elimelekh Shmulevitsh, Khayim Leyb Fuks, and Yisroel Shtern."
 
Yung-Idish was also the subject of a scholarly monograph by the Polish art historian Jerzy Malinowski: Grupa "Jung Idysz" i żydowskie środowisko "Nowej Sztuki" w Polsce, 1918-1923. Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk, Instytut Sztuki, 1987.
 
In addition, I see that there is a Facebook page devoted to the group:
 

Stanford's set of Yung-Idish is part of the Ezra Lahad Collection, which was acquired by Roger Kohn for Stanford in 1998.  The issues, on crumbling thin cardboard stock, were painstakingly conserved by the Stanford Libraries' professional conservators in 2012, prior to their digitization.

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