Sam Harris is a well-known author, neuroscientist, and co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, which is building an internet archive of secular resources. Today at 4:00 p.m. in Cubberley Auditorium Sam will be speaking on "the intersection of science and human values" and will respond to a student panel as well as to questions from the audience. Stanford has many of his works, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, and Letter to a Christian Nation.

Stanford University Libraries has announced the shortlist for the fifth William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, commonly known as the Saroyan Prize.

The Saroyan Prize is intended to encourage new or emerging writers and honor William Saroyan's literary legacy of originality, vitality and stylistic innovation. It recognizes newly published works of both fiction and non-fiction; a prize of $5,000 will be awarded in each category. Winners will be announced this summer.

We have in Special Collections a number of collections of Saroyan material, including manuscripts, personal journals, correspondence, business records, fan mail, books, drawings, family papers, and memorabilia.

On March 8-9th of this year, the Colloquium on Rethinking the Future of Scientific Communication was convened by Nader Rifai of Harvard Medical School and Stanford’s own Michael Keller and John Sack. There was an impressive roster including but not limited to: Anurag Acharaya, a distinguished engineer at Google Scholar; Catherine Mitchell, Director of Publishing for California Digital Library; Rick Luce, Vice Provost & Director of Libraries at Emory University along with several equally accomplished participants.

These industry leaders were brought together to identify innovative ways to harness the information technology explosion that allows researchers new ways to access the scholarly communication pipeline. New access options on the pipeline include everything from blogs to online datasets and ranges from manuscript submission to post-publication revisions. The participants highlighted ways to create continuity across the pipeline and providing better filtering for material. Discussion topics allowed them to emphasize the urgency need to keep pace with the revolutionary transformation of search and discovery by the popular press. Topics included:
➢ Filtering: coping with information overload
➢ Social bots (AI)
➢ Shared data and circles of trust between labs
➢ Linked data in support of research and scholarly communication
➢ Discovery of and contextualization of data
➢ Citizen science: calls for local and global thinking
➢ Annotation: linking comments back to content and context

Mike Keller addressed two topics in his opening remarks. He discussed web-based annotations specifically. Generally speaking these are annotations of individual lines or sentences of digital objects by scholars. Mr. Keller shared that Stanford University Libraries along with scholars from other universities are engaged in web-based annotations relating to digital avatars of medieval manuscripts.

Secondly, Mr. Keller discussed linked data, which involves transcoding from metadata or preparing RDF triples and URIs. This process enables navigation among countless information objects. If these are then transmitted to the global cloud and reconciled the process will lead to the establishment of new relationships as well as the reconciliation of ambiguities. For more information on this progressive colloquium, click here.

The 41st annual Stanford Powwow will be taking place this weekend (May 11-13) in the Eucalyptus Grove.

From the Stanford Report article on the Powwow:

A powwow is a large social gathering of Indians – a place to renew old friendships and forge new ones, to celebrate and preserve a rich cultural heritage through singing, drumming and dancing, and to introduce the old ways to the young. It is also a place for non-Natives to become part of the celebration of Native ways.

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The Stanford Powwow is free and open to the public. Participants are expected from American Indian tribes near and far. The event is expected to attract about 30,000 people. It is the largest student-run powwow in the nation.

You can look here for library resources on Native North Americans and American Indians and here for resources on Native Americans of California more specifically.

Photo by L.A. Cicero.