The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian
Link Love: 8/19/2011
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It’s an old fashioned card catalogue full of jokes! The National Museum of American History gives insight into Phyllis Diller’s “gag file”—50,000 annotated jokes featured in a new exhibition at the museum.
- How are institutions preserving born digital art? Here’s an article about Rhizome’s ArtBase—an archive of digital artworks [via the National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program].
- Smithsonian Institution Libraries has a big plan to digitize and convert many of their Spanish language publications for e-readers. You can even suggest publications that you’d like to see included in the project.
- I wonder if this will change the way some of us navigate the web? Google has released “Google Related”: a toolbar and extension feature that displays a narrow bar of related content, including video, news, and websites, whenever you complete a search.
- What did a PC look like back in the 1970s? (I didn’t even know they made them back then!)
- Whoa—pretty wild. A video demonstrating how the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History uncovers what a mummy looks like with CT scans and 3D technology:
“Egyptian mummy CT scan video, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History,” via the SmithsonianScience YouTube Channel. This video was made possible by Meg Rivers in the Exhibition Department and Dr. Dave Hunt in the Anthropology Department at the Natural History Museum and Adam Metallo and Vincent Rossi of the Smithsonian's Digitization Program Office.
Comments (4) – Leave a comment
I worked on one of those ancient computers. The disks we had to use were about the size of 33″ records. And now that I have an iMac, I’d never go back to the dark side.
I picked up a TRS80 at Value Village and have been meaning to get it to work. Haven’t yet.

Maureen-
A 33″ record! That’s pretty nuts! I didn’t even know those existed…
I’m glad you never have to deal with that again :)
Computers are moving along at the speed of light. Seems longer than 1981 when the first IBM PC came out.
Brian
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