Check out the Archives' New Forums

As you may have noticed, we have some new features on our website, which we’ll be highlighting over the next few weeks. Today, I want to focus on our new help forums. For years, the Archives has been answering your reference questions, as well as questions about your own archival collections care, by email, phone, letter, and fax (yes, even fax!), but we’ve never had a convenient place online for you to ask questions, or for us to post our answers. Now we finally do!

We’ve pre-populated the forums with a couple of commonly asked questions and answers about our photography collections and conducting research at the Archives, researching the Smithsonian's history, and taking care of your own collections. For example, need to know the best way to display an old map—we’re here for you. Or do you need to locate a bibliography about the Smithsonian’s history—yep, got that too. And if what you’re looking for isn’t on the forums, we’ve made it easy for you to post a new forum topic for one of our experts to answer.

We encourage you to look around the forums, and we look forward to hearing from you there!