Link Love: 9/16/2011

• Wired Science has great coverage of our recent “Field Book Lantern Slides” Flickr Commons set, complete with more information from the Smithsonian’s Thomas Jorstad, who works in the paleontology department at the National Museum of Natural History.
• Yeek! A Dust Archive (for real!) [via Marguerite Roby, SIA].
• “Do History Museums Still Need Objects?” (I’d vote yes): read this interesting article and then chime in with your own thoughts here [via @cjceglio].
• There's an interesting article on how museums are using technology on Mashable, including a call-out of some of the Smithsonian's projects as well as our Head of Mobile Strategy and Initiatives, Nancy Proctor. And there's a followup from Powerhouse Museum from Seb Chan, who says: "I expect that over the next decade we will see the very idea of a ‘digital team’ or ‘digital unit’ or even ‘CTO’ at a museum as quaint. Simply because the very definition of a museum will be, itself, ‘digital’ and cross-platform."
• And speaking of how we present history, the New York Times looks at how the Nixon and Reagan libraries choose to depict presidential history in different ways.
• The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture have launched The Civil Rights History Project, which presents oral-history interviews with participants in the civil rights movement.
• Hangingtogether.org talks up ArchiveGrid—a database and discovery service that will soon become free, and includes a million descriptions of archival collections held by libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives worldwide and enables researchers to learn about the contents of these collections.
• We've spoken about Wikipedians and Wikipedians at the Smithsonian several times this summer. Now, check out a recent edit-a-thon that took place at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art:

"Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Smithsonian," Courtesy of Philanthropyvideo.