Description: 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 6,000 queries per year. Ask us what people have been researching recently, and you’ll get into some
Description: When curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History looked at seven radiometers in storage, they learned the instruments had been at the Smithsonian for nearly one hundred fifty years.