Our approach to digitization is to capture the physicality of the objects as best as possible while primarily ensuring the writing or other content is fully legible and usable.

This object started its life as unbound note paper, and was later hard-bound to help preserve it and to make it more accessible and usable for researchers - but, perhaps losing some of the essence of the original object as Steinbeck knew and handled it.

Digitization is similar - we can't really communicate the physical experience of handling the object, but we do the best we can to convey the physicality while focusing primarily on readability/usability.

Modern history: The Negro Travelers' Green Book

One of the main goals of digitization is to broaden access to items held by Special Collections, and one of the most gratifying aspects of our work in DPG is enabling the sharing, in full, of items like this that help bring history - especially recent history that is still very much relevant today - to life, and not just for researchers, but for the general public as well.

Carolee Schneemann Scrapbook

Carolee Schneemann was an American painter and multimedia artist. Many of her complex, visually interesting, and uniquely-challenging-for-digitization notebooks and scrapbooks have been digitized by DPG. See more: Carolee Schneemann papers

DPG has digitized over 850 dime novels, at the time of writing, from Stanford Libraries' collection of over 8,000 dime novels. This is part of a large project involving other institutions with similar dime novel collections, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These items were mass-produced very inexpensively, and those that survived to end up in collections such as Stanford's are very fragile - much more fragile, in fact, than items like medieval manuscripts and other antiquarian materials that DPG handles - and pose many unique challenges to digitization.

Digitization allows access to materials like this that are too fragile to be handled safely for general viewing and research.

Early works by Yone Noguchi

These are the first published works by Yone Noguchi, poet and father to noted sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi.

Noguchi's poems were first published in the San Francisco magazine The Lark, issues 15 and 17. This collection of issues of The Lark was bound together very tightly, making it impossible to image the entire page.

Stanford's copy of Seen & Unseen was gifted by Noguchi to Joaquin Miller, who was a friend to Noguchi - Noguchi lived in a cabin on Miller's estate in the Oakland hills, which is now a park named after Miller.

Book of Chinese folk songs

This book of Chinese folk songs was published in San Francisco in 1915, and features a beautiful cover. Because the binding is very pliable and in good condition, we were able to image the pages as spreads, which we felt in this case better captured the physical object. This book reads right to left (RTL), which is fully supported by the online viewer.

Book with inserted loose items (ephemera)

This book, "The Representative Men of the Philippines", contained several inserted items, possibly used as bookmarks, and a large photo print. When the book was cataloged, the inserted items were removed and housed separately in archival envelopes, but their original positions within the book were noted - so when DPG digitized the book, we were able to place the items back inside the book where they had originally been found. They were also photographed separately and included at the end.

Item with circular/spiral binding

The nature of circular/spiral-bound items allows us to easily image them as a spread (if they are not too large), and we then have the option when cropping the images to do a perfect split down the center - the left and right pages are separate images, but join back together perfectly in the viewer.

This option is unique to circular bindings because of the buffer that the spirals provide - with other items imaged as spreads, such as the George White diaries shown earlier, it is nearly impossible in post-processing to create that perfect split down the middle.

Oversized archival document bound at top

From Stanford University Archives. "Bound object" does not just mean books, and DPG has worked on materials featuring many types of binding.

Bound object that is no longer bound

This sample book of paint colors and designs for locomotives was originally bound, but the binding no longer exists. In most cases we will take the pages out to image one by one, as seen here, rather than leaving them in a stack.