Highlighted Projects

Collections Underway | Non-collections Projects | NDIIPP/NGDA | NDIIPP/AIHT | Monterey Jazz Festival | R. Buckminster Fuller | Parker Library's Medieval Manuscripts on the Web

Collections Underway

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Non-collections Projects

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NDIIPP/NGDA

NDIIPP, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

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NDIIPP/AIHT

NDIIPP, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

AIHT, the Archive Ingest and Handling Test, a cooperative project funded by the Library of Congress as part of NDIIPP )

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Monterey Jazz Festival

The preservation of the Monterey Jazz Festival Collection held by the Archive of Recorded Sound is a multi-year, multi-part project initiated jointly by Stanford University Libraries and the Monterey Jazz Festival. The goal of the project is to preserve the 755 original audio and 92 original video recordings in the collection, which dates from 1958 and documents the world's longest running jazz festival through recorded performances of the most significant jazz musicians of the second half of the twentieth century. Grants have been awarded from the Grammy Foundation and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize the fragile and degrading analog audio tapes. Additional grant funding will be sought to preserve the video recordings.

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R. Buckminster Fuller

The R. Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection consists of audio and video materials culled and digitally reformatted from the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford. This project is supported in part by a grant from the Save America's Treasures program. Approximately 300 hours of audio and 80 hours of video shall be digitized from original magnetic tapes in the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection. The content spans the years 1955 to 1983 and includes interviews, speaking engagements, seminars, television clips, and the like. The public will be able to search the collection and access streaming media files over the Internet.

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Parker Library's Medieval Manuscripts on the Web

In June 2005, the University of Cambridge received a $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support work at Cambridge and Stanford that will make hundreds of medieval manuscripts accessible on the Internet. The collaborative project, involving the Stanford University Libraries, the Cambridge University Library and Corpus Christi College, will digitize more than 500 manuscripts housed in Corpus Christi's Parker Library. This unique collection, which spans the 6th to 16th centuries, contains some of the oldest works written in the English language, and some of the oldest extant examples of English art, as well as nearly a quarter of all the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the world.

Matthew Parker (1504-1575) was a powerful figure of the English Reformation, and was largely responsible for the establishment of the Church of England as a national institution. Parker served both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and at various times was Master of Corpus Christi College, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, confessor to Anne Boleyn, and Archbishop of Canterbury. Parker's greatest legacy is his library, consisting of some 600 manuscripts and books bequeathed to Corpus Christi in 1574. Parker was an avid book collector, salvaging medieval manuscripts dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries; he was particularly keen in preserving those materials that related to Anglo-Saxon England, motivated by his search for evidence of an ancient English-speaking church independent of Rome.

Although the library has drawn visiting scholars from around the world for more than a century, access to its materials has been limited due to space and preservation concerns. The Parker on the Web project will digitize more than 200,000 pages, including editions, translations and secondary works. The effort will also create a rich electronic research environment, with supporting tools such as flexible links between high-quality images of the manuscript pages and supporting texts. This will allow scholars to conduct both text-based and contextual research. The Mellon Foundation grant will fund the project's first production phase. The full project is expected to be complete in about four years.

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