Moving On

The Stanford SALT Project has since April been transitioning to the DLSS production development team. The start-up phase of the SALT Project is complete and I will be leaving SULAIR at the end of the fiscal year.

SALT in production will be built on the foundation being developed for Stanford Searchworks. This is a significant positive step toward realizing the value of digital online archives of distinguished faculty for historical research.

While I am moving into a new project, I am very interested to keep continuity and momentum of SALT activities and will be glad to continue to help, or to guide you to the appropriate SULAIR resource.

SALT Demo

I just put a link to our demo on the SALT website luminaryarchives.stanford.edu. This links to our "mash up" prototype. It is live an click-able, except you will not be able to see actual documents unless you have a Stanford ID and our team gives you authorization.

SALT Background (video)

I've posted a short video about the SALT Project on our site luminaryarchives.stanford.edu. This was a collaborative effort of our team and especially our Operations Assistant Rachael. I think it came out very well, please see it at this direct link to the SALT Movie.

SALT at British Library

I presented the SALT Project at the Digital Lives conference in London. The area of archiving, hosting, and presenting personal papers in the digital age is interesting and going to be of increasing importance. I've posted the current version of the slides on slideshare and linked to the SALT site.

SALT at SAA

I was invited to give my talk on the SALT Project to the Society of American Archivists (Science, Technology, and HealthCare Roundtable) by Paul Theerman of the National Library of Medicine, chair. This was at their annual meeting, San Francisco, August 27, 2008. My thanks to the Roundtable for the warm reception, good questions, and great ideas for collaborations.

SALT at DLF

I presented a "paper" on the Self Archiving Legacy Toolkit (SALT) Project at the Digital Library Federation Meeting in Minneapolis, April 29, 2008.

Abstract

This paper describes Stanford's work on the Self-Archiving Legacy Toolkit (SALT), which is exploring the capability of a human-computer system to transform unstructured and heterogeneous data into navigable collections of information presented in context. Stanford's University Archives are beginning to digitize and present the collected "papers" of luminary faculty. The full potential of this resource of scientific legacy is not realized by simple digitization. Through the application of semantic processing technologies (coupled with rich visualization tools), a luminary's lifetime collection of research, publications, correspondence and presentations can be accessed not only by keyword, but also by concept, collaborators, time, place, organization and even project. Our hypothesis is that these facets will transform the processing and delivery of personal archival collections, and expose the historical context and intellectual concepts threading through the careers of some of the greatest scientists and thinkers of the 20th century.

Central to the vision of SALT is the notion of self-description of a luminary's own corpus. In addition to providing oral history, video commentary and textual annotation to their collected works, the toolkit gives eminent researchers the tools to create, apply and edit their own taxonomies, ontologies and controlled vocabularies to their works. These knowledge editing tools will enable the archival subject to efficiently identify people, places, times, and concepts mentioned in their collected works and materials, and to draw relationships among these items to reveal paths of influence and the historic progression of ideas. In this way, they can interpret and extend their collection with their own personal viewpoint, creating a uniquely personal presentation of their own life story, which augments rather than replaces the traditional privileged view of archival provenance.

link to the presentation in pdf

New Leaves

I have returned to Stanford to manage a forward-looking software development initiative to digitize the scholarly life-work of luminary faculty, create software to enable annotation and organization of these collected works, and present this knowledge via the semantic web. The project is in the Stanford Universality Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) group. Stanford University is a thought leader in guiding academic libraries into the internet age, see this Stanford Magazine article .