Link Love: 6/3/2011

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  Many of the objects at the Smithsonian are the generous gifts of donors. Read a profile of donor, Richard Cranch Greenleaf, who gave over seven hundred pieces of lace, costumes, and textiles, (like this fancy embroidered 18th century waistcoat) to the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

• How interested are teenagers in preserving their digital lives? More than you might think, says the Library of Congress. After all, there’s a generation out there now that has been connected since birth [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]!

• Archives have wonderful materials that are often difficult to find because of a lack of metadata—the information that tells researchers and search engines what’s in a photograph, or describes an object. Enter Metadata Games. Professors at Dartmouth College hope that this experimental game  will successfully harness the power of the crowd to create archival metadata [via Marguerite Roby, SIA].

• The American Institute for Conservation has launched a new blog—Conservators Converse. Go and check it out [via Sarah Stauderman, SIA]!

• This week in Smithsonian History—Wilbur Wright writes to Smithsonian in 1899 for all of their information on human flight [via @airandspace].

• Wikipedia is in the top ten most used websites in the world. Hear Liam Wyatt, Wikimedia Foundation Cultural Partnerships Fellow, speak at the National Archives about possible partnerships between Wikipedians and cultural institutions like the National Archives (something the Smithsonian is very interested in as well!)

"Wikimedia with Liam Wyatt," Courtesy of the National Archives and the AOTUS Blog