Emma Stanford
@emmastanford.bsky.social
Your earnest friend in special collections digitization + access. Currently @ Stanford University Libraries, previously Hoover Institution Library & Archives, previously Bodleian Libraries, @e_stanf on Twitter.
Usually Google Docs can shut up with its suggestions but this time I couldn’t agree more, ORCID
June 25, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Usually Google Docs can shut up with its suggestions but this time I couldn’t agree more, ORCID
The coolest little #IIIF image tile demo from @latest.allmaps.org: observablehq.com/@allmaps/til... (I zoomed in on the dog because of #branding)
March 17, 2025 at 7:24 PM
The coolest little #IIIF image tile demo from @latest.allmaps.org: observablehq.com/@allmaps/til... (I zoomed in on the dog because of #branding)
Every time Taylor Swift sings "And the tennis court was covered up with some tentlike thing" I think to myself "It's called the Lung, Taylor" and I'm sharing this in case there are any other Swifties out there who have a complicated relationship with Infinite Jest
June 27, 2024 at 6:57 PM
Every time Taylor Swift sings "And the tennis court was covered up with some tentlike thing" I think to myself "It's called the Lung, Taylor" and I'm sharing this in case there are any other Swifties out there who have a complicated relationship with Infinite Jest
Are people really using ChatGPT to answer cataloging questions (e.g., "When was X railroad built so I can date this map")?
Diplomatically: it seems unwise to attribute informational value to ChatGPT responses when we know it can hallucinate and we can't control what sources it uses. 📜
Diplomatically: it seems unwise to attribute informational value to ChatGPT responses when we know it can hallucinate and we can't control what sources it uses. 📜
May 15, 2024 at 7:24 PM
Are people really using ChatGPT to answer cataloging questions (e.g., "When was X railroad built so I can date this map")?
Diplomatically: it seems unwise to attribute informational value to ChatGPT responses when we know it can hallucinate and we can't control what sources it uses. 📜
Diplomatically: it seems unwise to attribute informational value to ChatGPT responses when we know it can hallucinate and we can't control what sources it uses. 📜
Just now found myself typing "books" into the Library of Congress linked data service and hitting "search" and I'm worried that if I don't get this out in the open right away someone will try to blackmail me with it
April 24, 2024 at 6:42 PM
Just now found myself typing "books" into the Library of Congress linked data service and hitting "search" and I'm worried that if I don't get this out in the open right away someone will try to blackmail me with it
Hot damn this is a good blog post. Looking for a digitized copy of that de la Rue chromolithograph led me to this article, which reproduces some of the photographs themselves: artsandculture.google.com/story/starin...
Wishing everyone safe travels & clear skies as we await #Eclipse2024!
Learn about the history of #eclipse observation by reading this blog post by my colleague @finchinthestacks.bsky.social, featuring images from the Linda Hall Library's collections.
www.lindahall.org/about/news/a... #histSTM 🗃️📜
Learn about the history of #eclipse observation by reading this blog post by my colleague @finchinthestacks.bsky.social, featuring images from the Linda Hall Library's collections.
www.lindahall.org/about/news/a... #histSTM 🗃️📜
April 8, 2024 at 5:09 PM
Hot damn this is a good blog post. Looking for a digitized copy of that de la Rue chromolithograph led me to this article, which reproduces some of the photographs themselves: artsandculture.google.com/story/starin...
I know OpenAI is evil but I'm running Whisper on my laptop and guys it's just a little buddy trying its best
March 14, 2024 at 5:17 PM
I know OpenAI is evil but I'm running Whisper on my laptop and guys it's just a little buddy trying its best
I'm teaching some students about digitization and thought it would be fun to estimate how many years it will take to digitize all our collections at our current rate. Apropos of nothing, this manuscript is 1200 years old and these images are 30 years old. digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/783d...
February 29, 2024 at 11:00 PM
I'm teaching some students about digitization and thought it would be fun to estimate how many years it will take to digitize all our collections at our current rate. Apropos of nothing, this manuscript is 1200 years old and these images are 30 years old. digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/783d...
Incredibly foolish to suppose Taylor Swift doesn't know how apostrophes work, guys
(I am very excited for TTPD; I hope it's a mix of maroon/Vigilante Shit/my tears ricochet/illicit affairs; I can't wait to listen to it and pretend I too am eviscerating the small British men who've done me wrong)
(I am very excited for TTPD; I hope it's a mix of maroon/Vigilante Shit/my tears ricochet/illicit affairs; I can't wait to listen to it and pretend I too am eviscerating the small British men who've done me wrong)
Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" does not need an apostrophe.
Could Taylor Swift’s New Album Be Missing Something?
Grammarians wonder: Should there be an apostrophe in “The Tortured Poets Department”?
www.nytimes.com
February 8, 2024 at 5:23 AM
Incredibly foolish to suppose Taylor Swift doesn't know how apostrophes work, guys
(I am very excited for TTPD; I hope it's a mix of maroon/Vigilante Shit/my tears ricochet/illicit affairs; I can't wait to listen to it and pretend I too am eviscerating the small British men who've done me wrong)
(I am very excited for TTPD; I hope it's a mix of maroon/Vigilante Shit/my tears ricochet/illicit affairs; I can't wait to listen to it and pretend I too am eviscerating the small British men who've done me wrong)
Reposted by Emma Stanford
Ben Albritton discuss the advantage of a multi-institution model for conservation of digital repositories. 'Changing the one-institution model is one key to sustainability and risk mitigation' @blalbritton.bsky.social
#NYSINYD
#NYSINYD
February 7, 2024 at 5:44 PM
Ben Albritton discuss the advantage of a multi-institution model for conservation of digital repositories. 'Changing the one-institution model is one key to sustainability and risk mitigation' @blalbritton.bsky.social
#NYSINYD
#NYSINYD
Reposted by Emma Stanford
Andrew Prescott: 'When you go somewhere like the National Archives, everybody is just taking pictures all day long. You realise that there's a potential there to build a very large resource. [...] But one needs to be able to do it as simply as loading images.'
#NYSINYD
#NYSINYD
February 7, 2024 at 6:26 PM
Andrew Prescott: 'When you go somewhere like the National Archives, everybody is just taking pictures all day long. You realise that there's a potential there to build a very large resource. [...] But one needs to be able to do it as simply as loading images.'
#NYSINYD
#NYSINYD
(This sounds amazing but my institution specializes in sensitive 20th- and 21st-century material, so we'd probably have to spend a lot of time chasing violations of our new one-line reading room use agreement, "I WILL NOT POST MY IMAGES ON MANUSCRIPTR")
Folks are ideating a specialist Flickr/Wikimedia-like tool that facilitates easy tagging and description (integrated with institutions' online catalogues?), allows you to search across your own and others' research images, and isn't going to die or become very expensive in a few years' time.
February 7, 2024 at 6:30 PM
(This sounds amazing but my institution specializes in sensitive 20th- and 21st-century material, so we'd probably have to spend a lot of time chasing violations of our new one-line reading room use agreement, "I WILL NOT POST MY IMAGES ON MANUSCRIPTR")
So far: Stewart Brookes citing the Bodleian's GitHub manuscript catalogues as an example of a LOCKSS-style alternative in case library sites go down, and @etreharne.bsky.social making the point that restricting image downloads makes it harder for scholars to maintain their own archives of images.
🗣️'Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Sustainable Access in a Digital Age' - 02/07
Medievalsky, only one week before our panel on sustainable access vs. physicality of medieval manuscripts in the digital age, following the BL digital disruption.
Info and Registration: tinyurl.com/3bfmhcnj
Medievalsky, only one week before our panel on sustainable access vs. physicality of medieval manuscripts in the digital age, following the BL digital disruption.
Info and Registration: tinyurl.com/3bfmhcnj
February 7, 2024 at 5:22 PM
So far: Stewart Brookes citing the Bodleian's GitHub manuscript catalogues as an example of a LOCKSS-style alternative in case library sites go down, and @etreharne.bsky.social making the point that restricting image downloads makes it harder for scholars to maintain their own archives of images.
Reposted by Emma Stanford
🗣️'Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Sustainable Access in a Digital Age' - 02/07
Medievalsky, only one week before our panel on sustainable access vs. physicality of medieval manuscripts in the digital age, following the BL digital disruption.
Info and Registration: tinyurl.com/3bfmhcnj
Medievalsky, only one week before our panel on sustainable access vs. physicality of medieval manuscripts in the digital age, following the BL digital disruption.
Info and Registration: tinyurl.com/3bfmhcnj
January 31, 2024 at 12:06 PM
🗣️'Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Sustainable Access in a Digital Age' - 02/07
Medievalsky, only one week before our panel on sustainable access vs. physicality of medieval manuscripts in the digital age, following the BL digital disruption.
Info and Registration: tinyurl.com/3bfmhcnj
Medievalsky, only one week before our panel on sustainable access vs. physicality of medieval manuscripts in the digital age, following the BL digital disruption.
Info and Registration: tinyurl.com/3bfmhcnj
I love this idea and if someone had shown K-12 Emma a medieval manuscript over Zoom we would be living in a totally different world right now
Would you like to bring medieval manuscripts into your classroom? How about a VIRTUAL CLASSROOM VISIT? We'll work with you to come up with the perfect book list for your K-12, undergrad or grad class, featuring manuscripts from Penn's collections.
schoenberginstitute.org/virtual-clas...
schoenberginstitute.org/virtual-clas...
Virtual Classroom Visits
Instructors: Dot Porter and Nicholas Herman Are you a medievalist or early modernist? Are you a K-12 teacher with a unit on medieval or renaissance history? Are you a library science instructor who te...
schoenberginstitute.org
January 24, 2024 at 1:27 AM
I love this idea and if someone had shown K-12 Emma a medieval manuscript over Zoom we would be living in a totally different world right now
Grateful to Ciaran for this write-up! I've admired the BL's straightforward comms so far and I hope they publish more information in due course. We can probably all stand to beef up the disaster-preparedness component of our systems architecture (and of our vendor support contracts).
My best attempt at making sense of what has been happening at the British Library and more importantly how to learn from it
ciaranmartin.substack.com/p/on-the-mat...
ciaranmartin.substack.com/p/on-the-mat...
On the matter of the British Library cyber incident
The most important lesson to figure out is why it is taking so long to restore services. That will tell us how to prevent such a calamity in other vital national institutions.
ciaranmartin.substack.com
January 24, 2024 at 1:17 AM
Grateful to Ciaran for this write-up! I've admired the BL's straightforward comms so far and I hope they publish more information in due course. We can probably all stand to beef up the disaster-preparedness component of our systems architecture (and of our vendor support contracts).
Reposted by Emma Stanford
How the New York Public Library is navigating "challenges in providing access to one essential category of research materials: published monographs that are neither in the public domain nor commercially available for the library to purchase or license digitally." #FeedingTheElephant
Introducing The New York Public Library’s Scholarly Press Backlist Revival Project | H-Net
A guest post from Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communications. Guest post by Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director, Information Policy; and Kathleen Riegelhaupt, director e...
networks.h-net.org
January 17, 2024 at 4:02 PM
How the New York Public Library is navigating "challenges in providing access to one essential category of research materials: published monographs that are neither in the public domain nor commercially available for the library to purchase or license digitally." #FeedingTheElephant
Absolutely top-notch article about SEO ⬇️
New from me: I wrote about how search algorithms have created a web full of content and words for Google, not humans. We made a fake lizard website to show you what has happened over 25 yrs.
The visuals are beautiful. I’m so proud to work with such talented people! www.theverge.com/c/23998379/g...
The visuals are beautiful. I’m so proud to work with such talented people! www.theverge.com/c/23998379/g...
January 8, 2024 at 7:40 PM
Absolutely top-notch article about SEO ⬇️
As a newish basketball fan and an oldish Hanif Abdurraqib fan I am very delighted by the prospect of this book: bookshop.org/p/books/ther...
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension a book by Hanif Abdurraqib
A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, life, and home--from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America "Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book ...
bookshop.org
January 5, 2024 at 9:07 PM
As a newish basketball fan and an oldish Hanif Abdurraqib fan I am very delighted by the prospect of this book: bookshop.org/p/books/ther...
This is a great analogy, except we're still using the broken search engines, and we don't always realize how broken they are. Has information literacy training moved past "This tool works" to "Here's how to tell when a tool has stopped working because its creators have deliberately broken it"?
When I was growing up it was hard to convince older people you couldn't just show up and apply for a job anymore. They just couldn't wrap their heads around it.
Now we tell younger people to "just Google it" without appreciating that all the search engines are broken.
Now we tell younger people to "just Google it" without appreciating that all the search engines are broken.
January 5, 2024 at 9:02 PM
This is a great analogy, except we're still using the broken search engines, and we don't always realize how broken they are. Has information literacy training moved past "This tool works" to "Here's how to tell when a tool has stopped working because its creators have deliberately broken it"?
Reposted by Emma Stanford
Digitization is pricey, and the BL will have some SERIOUS bills to pay v soon.
Also pricey is that fancypants, subcontracted image/permission website they launched last year or so, which remains up.
There is no world in which repro fees cover anything, but they never did, and were clearly a sop.
Also pricey is that fancypants, subcontracted image/permission website they launched last year or so, which remains up.
There is no world in which repro fees cover anything, but they never did, and were clearly a sop.
So while everyone's learning about IP...
I've been thinking about the British appeals court case re: repro fees and the BL situation.
Does the BL deprioritize getting its digitized materials back up (or not repost at all), bc they'd now be useable for free? Do they mothball digitization?
I've been thinking about the British appeals court case re: repro fees and the BL situation.
Does the BL deprioritize getting its digitized materials back up (or not repost at all), bc they'd now be useable for free? Do they mothball digitization?
January 1, 2024 at 6:38 PM
Digitization is pricey, and the BL will have some SERIOUS bills to pay v soon.
Also pricey is that fancypants, subcontracted image/permission website they launched last year or so, which remains up.
There is no world in which repro fees cover anything, but they never did, and were clearly a sop.
Also pricey is that fancypants, subcontracted image/permission website they launched last year or so, which remains up.
There is no world in which repro fees cover anything, but they never did, and were clearly a sop.
Reposted by Emma Stanford
Really pleased to announce the launch of a new version (9.0) of the Old Bailey Online oldbaileyonline.org. There is lots of new functionality, and a thoroughly redesigned front and back end.
December 12, 2023 at 9:41 AM
Really pleased to announce the launch of a new version (9.0) of the Old Bailey Online oldbaileyonline.org. There is lots of new functionality, and a thoroughly redesigned front and back end.
This slaps (cw for what you'd expect based on the title)
Using Metadata To Mitigate The Risks Of Digitizing Archival Photographs Of Violence And Oppression 📜 elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol10/i...
Using Metadata To Mitigate The Risks Of Digitizing Archival Photographs Of Violence And Oppression
Questioning the archival imperative of access, this research article discussed how descriptive metadata can be used to contextualize and problematize digitized archival photographs, which are often in...
elischolar.library.yale.edu
December 11, 2023 at 9:20 PM
This slaps (cw for what you'd expect based on the title)
Reposted by Emma Stanford
Despite frequent remonstrations, Persephone never accepted that she could not photocopy a whole book in one go.
December 6, 2023 at 7:02 PM
Despite frequent remonstrations, Persephone never accepted that she could not photocopy a whole book in one go.
Well this is extremely cool: the David Rumsey Map Collection and Luna Imaging have launched browsable, correctable full-text search powered by #IIIF annotations and mapKurator machines-reading-maps.github.io/rumsey/
December 5, 2023 at 6:56 PM
Well this is extremely cool: the David Rumsey Map Collection and Luna Imaging have launched browsable, correctable full-text search powered by #IIIF annotations and mapKurator machines-reading-maps.github.io/rumsey/