Posts tagged with: Conservation
Link Love: 5/11/2012
- Smithsonian Magazine writes about how newfound negatives provide what are believed to be the only pictures of a living nestling of an ivory-billed woodpecker—America’s rarest bird.
- A digital archivist’s horror story. How the movie Toy Story 2 was accidentally deleted (and then restored). Moral of the story? Back up those files! [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]
- A little late for May Day, but getting me in the Spring spirit nevertheless: maypoles across the Flickr Commons [via Susannah Wells, SIA].
- John Gray, former president of the Autry National Center of the American West, has been named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
- “The Hemingway Papers” Digital Archive is now available, and features newspaper articles written by the famous author during his tenure as a columnist at the Toronto Star newspaper from 1920–1924 on subjects like fishing, sports and war [via INFOdocket].
- The National Portrait Gallery on the tricky science of conserving some Civil War era prints in their collections.
- Why do old books smell? [via swissmiss]
Introducing the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ New Flickr Photostream
Hooray for the arrival of this long-awaited day! That’s right, folks. The Smithsonian Institution Archives has officially launched their very own Flickr photostream.
Following in the footsteps of many pioneering Smithsonian organizations, our new photostream will provide an inside look at the Archives by highlighting our sponsored workshops, presentations, and conservation efforts, as well as snapshots of interns, volunteers, and staff whistling as they work (seriously, at the Archives, we’re like a symphonic choir of birds).
As many of you may know, the Archives manages and contributes photos to the Smithsonian Flickr Commons stream, which highlights no-known copyright images from the Smithsonian’s many museums and research units. We hope that the new Smithsonian Institution Archives photostream will give you a new perspective on the Archives that our historic photos on the Flickr Commons cannot—a view into our day-to-day, behind-the-scenes work.
To accompany this launch, and in celebration of MayDay, Sarah Stauderman recently blogged about emergency preparedness at the Archives and introduced our very first set of images, “Emergency Workshop on the Recovery of Water Damaged Materials.”
Unlike the no-known copyright usage of the Smithsonian Institution’s photostream in the Flickr Commons, images featured in the Archives’ photostream adopt a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. We encourage our virtual patrons to share and/or remix these images, according to the Creative Commons license.
If you feel so inclined, and have your own Flickr account, please add us as a contact! We also encourage you to subscribe to our Flickr Photostream RSS feed so that you can keep up with all of our new images sets as they're added. We hope you’ll enjoy this new project, as we continue to rollout behind-the-scenes images of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Talking and Doing About Emergency Preparation
Every May the Smithsonian Institution Archives participates in MayDay: Do One Thing for Emergency Preparedness! Each MayDay archives, libraries, museums, and arts and historic preservation organizations around the world are encouraged to help protect cultural heritage from disasters, by setting aside time to become prepared for an emergency. We encourage you to make sure your institution is prepared!
This year we celebrate this important event by launching a brand new Smithsonian Institution Archives Flickr photo stream featuring images of the Archives’ everyday activities. Our first ever set on the Archives’ new Flickr account features images of basic emergency response for paper-based collections.
These images come from a workshop conducted in 2011 by the Archives’ fantastic summer intern, Jessica Lapinsky, in which archivists and collections managers at the Smithsonian had a chance to get their hands wet and experiment with different recovery techniques. Jessica has since gone on to deliver lectures and workshops at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science on emergency planning and recovery. You can see the slides or download the audio from Jessica’s workshop on the University of Illinois website.
Link Love: 4/20/2012
From archiving video footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and preserving emails from China during Tiananmen Square protests, to crowdsourcing photo ids on the Smithsonian Flickr Commons: a wonderful profile of our director, Anne Van Camp, on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog.- So exciting! Our Wikipedian-in-Residence, Sarah Steirch, talks about her mission to increase the presence of women on Wikipedia on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s culture show Q with Jian Ghomeshi. Listen
abovehere (the embedded mp3 was autoplaying, so click through to listen instead). - A collection of food and other product packaging from the Hagley Library imparts important lessons and information about how our packaging effects the environment, and the jobs of conservationists [via Marcel Chotowski LaFollette, SIA].
- A familiar problem for parents and high schools? A conservator writes for Archives Outside about how to remove chewing gum stuck on paper.
- Fires, floods, scary animals, and dashing bravery . . . An Indiana Jones movie marathon? No silly, exciting accounts from our field notes collections at our sister blog The Field Book Project.
- Speaking of scary movies, here’s a bit on the restoration of the original JAWS negatives [via Marguerite Roby, SIA].
- The Space Shuttle Discovery arrived at the Smithsonian this week! It was mounted atop a modified 747 jet, and made several passes over the National Mall in Washington, DC before landing at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Check out the video below:
Panda-monium!
Forty years ago today, “panda-monium” officially struck Washington, DC with the arrival of two giant pandas at Andrews Air Force Base. The pandas, Hsing-Hsing (male) and Ling-Ling (female), were a state gift from the People’s Republic of China following President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the country (Nixon presented the Chinese with a pair of musk oxen). They were officially presented to the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park on April 20, 1972, four days after their arrival in the country, and were accepted by First Lady Patricia Nixon.
National Zoological Park Director, Theodore Reed, had warned that the pandas "willsteal your heart away." The public was definitely enthused. Over a million people visited the zoo in the first four weeks that the pandas were on display (as compared to 677,115 visitors during the same period the previous year). On Sunday, April 23 alone, there were 75,757 visitors to the zoo. Sybil E. Hamlet, Public Information Officer, warned the public that they could expect waits of up to 45 minutes to see the pandas. The best time to view them was at feeding times, 10 am and 4 pm.
Leading up to their arrival, zoo staff knew that the pandas had been given Chinese names, but not what those names were. Many individuals wrote with suggestions. Hamlet responded to one such letter, "There have been many people suggesting the names Ping and Pong but it was thought that to honor such a generous gift, their Chinese names should be retained."
The National Zoo had high hopes for baby pandas. Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling were generally kept apart to mimic what was believed to be panda behavior in the wild. They were first brought together on May 26, 1973 when Ling-Ling went into heat. Hsing-Hsing, however, did not seem to know what to do. The public sent mail addressed to the pandas to encourage them in their endeavors. One such card, written by Rosalind Peest (or Reest—the spelling is unclear) in 1973, included a poem:
Prothalamium for a Pair of Pandas
Of thee I Hsing-Hsing, baby!
You have got that certain thing, Baby!
Oh some bells ring-a-ding-ding!
But this wedding-belle is a-peal-a-Ling-Ling!!
Precious pair
Your courtship is complete riot…
So…
In matrimonium
I predict
Perfect panda-monium!!
Mating and/or artificial insemination as well as the subsequent "pregnancy watch" would become an annual tradition at the zoo and often made national headlines. The wait was often dramatic due to the difficulties in determining if a panda is pregnant. 
Ultimately, Ling-Ling gave birth five times, but none of the cubs survived.
Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing passed away in 1992 and 1999, respectively. In 2000, the National Zoo received another two pandas on loan from China, Tian Tian (male) and Mei Xiang (female). On July 9, 2005, Mei Xiang gave birth to Tai Shan (male), the first surviving panda cub to be born at the National Zoo.
More information about Hsing-Hsing, Ling-Ling, and all of the giant pandas at the National Zoo can be found in our collections and on the zoo's website. Other panda-related stories here on The Bigger Picture include a post about the zoo’s former photographer, "Remembering Jessie Cohen" and a post about one of the zoo’s panda researchers entitled "The Archival Legacy of Devra Kleiman."
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