Hot Topix in Archival Research, Spring 2018

This is the latest post in our "Hot Topix" series.  In each quarterly edition we show you what the reference team has been up to, and bring you some of the more notable inuqires we have received.

Vicarious research is one of the great joys of the reference desk at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. From our front-row (well, only-row) seat outside the reading room, we catch tantalizing glimpses of our patrons’ manifold research topics.

The reference team fields around 9,000 queries per year. Ask us what people have been researching recently, and you’ll get into some of the enlightening, weird, and fascinating details of collections at the Smithsonian Institutive Archives. Here is a sample of the diverse questions our researchers have been exploring for the past few months!

Over the past three months, researchers have delved into:

• Paintings by Kate T. Cory accessioned into the Smithsonian American Art Museum

• Spencer F. Baird's correspondence with entomologist John Lawrence LeConte

• An argon laser photocoagulator shown in the National Museum of History and Technology's (now the National Museum of American History)1970 exhibit "Laser 10: The First Ten Years of Laser Technology"

• Records of loan agreements for objects related to 19^th-century actress Charlotte Cushman

• Inaugural exhibition checklist for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

• Non-liquid methods of cleaning photographic slides

• Folios of the Houghton Shahnameh

• Images of collecting sites in California found in the Edgar Alexander Mearns Papers

Permissions for upcoming publications using our photos or documents include:

• Diana Marsh, National Anthropological Archives, fossil lab draft plans for forthcoming book Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: An Ethnography of Smithsonian's Fossil Exhibitions (2019)

• Kit Heintzman, Science History Institute, photograph of tiger taxidermy in progress

• Andrew Zuccaro, McGraw Hill, portrait of Bertha Parker Pallan for publication on earth sciences

• Yoshiko Honda, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, photograph of samurai group exhibit case originally shown at 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

• Chelsea Cole, National Gallery of Art, map of Columbian Institute’s National Mall garden plot for the History of Early American Landscape Design digital repository

A women-in-science social media storm!

In March, the Archives’ outreach and reference teams caught wind of a viral tweet from illustrator Candace Jean Andersen, who hoped to identify the sole unidentified figure--and only African-American woman--in a 1971 group photo from a whale biology conference. The Twitter thread passed through networks of marine biologists and women of color in STEM before reaching the reference inbox. By that point, the Twitterverse had tentatively identified the figure as Sheila Minor. She was thought to have attended the conference as a Smithsonian employee alongside supervisor Clyde Jones.

Sure enough, a search of the Records of the United States Marine Mammal Program, surfaced Sheila Minor's name among hotel receipts for the conference! We also found a biographical file documenting Ms. Minor's years as a Biological Research Technician with the Chesapeake Bay Center for Environmental Studies (CBCES)--today's Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, or SERC. Now, you can read and contribute to Sheila Minor's Wikipedia page, or help out with SIA's women in science “to-do list.”