Presenting “Digitization Exemplars”: a new resource for SUL staff and our collaborators

Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS) has published a new reference resource about the work we produce in digitization services: Digitization Exemplars. This exhibit features an array of examples of each of the kinds of materials that we digitally reformat in our various labs.

The purpose of this site is to serve as a reference for library staff and patrons who use our digitization services. It may also be of interest to collection donors and project collaborators who want to know how their digitized materials are presented online in Stanford’s digital library. We will continue to populate it with new exemplars created in the course of our ongoing work.

It’s easy to browse by high-level content format categories (depicted above). And because each exhibit item is tagged extensively, it is possible to navigate across format categories by way of the tags, such as “stanford” or “oral history”. 

Our three specialized teams — the Born-Digital Preservation Lab (BDPL), the Digital Production Group (DPG), and the Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) — collaborated to build this resource over the past year. The teams share a common purpose: to enable use of collection materials via digital technology with utmost attention to preservation quality and long term access. Yet the nature of each team’s work — the concerns, tools, and processes — is inherently different. In each lab’s section (under the “How We Work” menu), we include information about some of the decisions to be made in the course of reformatting or otherwise processing this material for digital preservation and access.

For instance:

Be sure to check out the About Digitization Exemplars section, which includes links to pages with tips and tricks for using the SDR’s media and image viewers. 

Many thanks to all the people who had a hand in the realization of this project: Michael Angeletti, Cathy Aster, Jen Diaz, Kylee Diedrich, Kat Dimitruk, Hannah Frost, Chris Hacker, Dinah Handel, Kabir Hermon, Celeste Huang-Menders, Michele Mobley, Quyen-Anh Laura Nguyen, Michael Olson, Annie Schweikert, Tati Scutelnic, Astrid Smith, Abigail Watson, Geoff Willard, and Justine Xi.