Knitting your way across the Flickr Commons.- The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Project has launched, with more than 1,900 documents, photographs, and films of South Africa's first black president available online [via Michael Edson, Smithsonian].
- This week in Smithsonian history: the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory opened in Panama as the Institute for Research in Tropical America. Read more about this Smithsonian research center in a guest blog post by our own Courtney Esposito over at the Smithsonian Collections Blog.
- What do you think about our updated Facebook page? Our new “milestones” features momentous occasions and historic photographs from Smithsonian history.
- An interesting and sad piece of history: this week the discovery of two original albums of photographs of paintings and furniture looted by the Nazis was announced. The US National Archives blog talks about the discovery, and the importance of these albums.
- What do our books, newspapers, blogs, and tweets say about us? The New York Times talks about the development of computer-based tools that comb through the words of written works to find common themes.
- Beginning in the late 1880s, Thomas Edison's labs not only built the equipment for filming and projecting films, but produced popular content for the new medium. Here, the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture, the Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze is a short film made by W. K. L. Dickson in January 1894 for advertising purposes. Just one of many film nuggets from the Library of Congress’ Edison Company early films collection.
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