Stanford University Libraries

Stanford University Libraries’ holdings encompass hundreds of thousands of rare books as well as dozens of medieval and early modern manuscripts, cuneiform tablets, and papyri. There are numerous personal and corporate archives to explore (including materials by Buckminster Fuller, Apple Inc., the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and poets and artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Ruth Asawa to name just a few). Stanford Libraries are home to tens of thousands of objects in our Silicon Valley Archive (in Green Library’s Hohbach Hall), and hundreds of thousands of photos from Silicon Valley and the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In addition, we house almost half a million recordings in the Archive of Recorded Sound, and a quarter of a million contemporary maps in the Branner Library along with well over ten thousand rare maps, globes, and atlases in the David Rumsey Map Collection, the majority of them digitized and available online. There are over eleven million physical volumes, over three million e-books, over 65,000 serial licenses, and enumerable digital resources, including datasets. At the forefront of digital library development, Stanford University Libraries have developed and are operating the Stanford Digital Repository, which contains millions of digital objects. The Libraries further make available hundreds of digital exhibits, and our staff teach workshops on topics ranging from coding in R to text mining and the latest geospatial technologies. Behind the scenes, the Libraries’ staff have developed and deployed numerous applications that deliver a seamless online experience to users at Stanford and at libraries across the World, many of which have adopted our technologies that are made available without charge. Of particular interest and high levels of adoption is the LOCKSS network caching application that is the basis of the CLOCKSS service.