Description: So you know those thousand words a picture is worth? It’s true! Though my idea of what those thousand words should be might differ from yours and that’s why we’re going to talk about descriptive metadata, controlled vocabularies, and levels of access. Boy howdy, sounds like a wild ride, eh? When I was younger and infinitely more creative with how I spent my time I used to
Description: November is here and the leaves seem to finally be changing, which heralds the end of October is American Archives Month. Our 31-day Blogathon was a smashing success, garnering about 10,000 visits, and even though Archives month has come to a close, we will continue to post about our profession, our stories, and our wonderfully unique treasures. [caption id="attachment_9907"
Description: In November, Smithsonian Institution Archives moved over 3 million photographic negatives to a new state of the art facility at the Smithsonian Institution Support Center (SISC) in Hyattsville, Maryland.
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives manages the cold storage vault at the National Museum of American History where approximately 3 million negatives are stored.
Description: Did you know that May is National Photography Month? Declared by Congress as a month-long event in 1987, National Photography Month celebrates all aspects of photography. We invite you to see what our photographers were up to a century before this declaration in this behind- the-scenes slideshow of the photographic laboratory spaces, set-ups, and equipment of the United States
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Photo shoebox upset, by Stephen Cummings, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] I recently took a position as photograph archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and hope to be able to share through this blog some of the processes we are undertaking to make our photographic collections more useful and