Stanford Facts: Libraries & Computing

Stanford Libraries

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) supports Stanford’s mission of teaching, learning and research by making information and knowledge accessible and preserving it for the future. The libraries have amassed collections of books, journals, scores and printed reference works numbering more than 8.5 million volumes. There are nearly 1.5 million audiovisual materials, more than 75,000 current serials, thousands of digital resources and nearly 6 million microform holdings. Access to the libraries is extended to non-university users for seven days a year free of charge upon registration. Contact the Privileges Office at (650) 723-1492.

Special Collections and University Archives include about 260,000 rare or otherwise “special” books and 59 million pages of unpublished materials, including the archives, manuscripts, papers and correspondence of luminaries, scholars, technologists and writers; hundreds of thousands of archival photographs; corporate records and archives, with an emphasis on the Silicon Valley region and California history; and deep resources in Stanford’s own history. These primary-source and historical resources are available both to students and researchers for use in the Field Special Collections reading room in Green Library. Undergraduates are encouraged to conduct original research among these collections.

Stanford University Press

Founded in 1925, Stanford University Press publishes about 130 books per year. About two-thirds are scholarly monographs and textbooks in the humanities and the social sciences, with a concentration in history, literature, philosophy and Asian studies, and growing lists in politics, sociology, anthropology and religion. The remaining third are textbooks, professional reference works and monographs in law, business, economics, public policy and education. Tenure monographs account for about 20 percent of the press’ scholarly output, and translations account for about 12 percent.

HighWire Press

HighWire Press, Stanford’s electronic journal developing and hosting service, produces the online versions of 1,100 peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. Since 1995, HighWire has partnered with major scholarly societies, hosting sites such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Science Magazine, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Oxford English Dictionary. HighWire’s search portal incorporates MEDLINE searching with full-text literature searching, a 58,000+ term taxonomy-based subject browsing, innovative alerting and comprehensive reference linking.

Main and Branch Libraries

Coordinate Libraries

Computing at Stanford

Stanford houses one of the most extensive computing environments of any university. Services include email, web hosting, distributed file systems, wireless and remote Internet access, courseware and research and high-performance computing facilities.

SUNet, the Stanford University Network, includes more than 150,000 computers with assigned Internet protocol addresses. About 60,000 are active on any given day. More than 9.5 terabytes of data flow between SUNet and the Internet each day. Stanford has 40,000 email accounts and delivers about two million incoming mail messages daily on systems supported by Information Technology Services. Stanford is one of more than 200 universities connected to Internet2.

Students are not required to own computers at Stanford, although an estimated 99 percent do, with about 84 percent owning laptops. All residences on campus have a cluster of computers for use day or night.

Stanford has been a leader in computer use, research and instruction. A high-speed electronic calculator was installed on campus in 1953, and the university’s first computer, an IBM 650, was installed in 1956. The first faculty member specializing in computers joined the Mathematics Department in 1957. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was created in 1962, and the Computer Science Department was founded in 1965. In 1977, high-quality computing became available for students and faculty 24 hours a day. In 1984, trenches were dug for SUNet and, in 1988, Stanford’s network was one of the first to connect to the Internet. In 1987, Stanford established the first residential computing program in the country. In 1991, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center created the first U.S. website. The university’s leadership in engineering and computer science helped spur the development of Silicon Valley.