Description: When James Smithson wrote his will on October 23, 1826, he made several bequests to people before adding the contingent clause that created the Smithsonian Institution. One bequest was to a resident of London’s notorious East End.
Description: Open source tools, CERP, JHOVE, DROID, Heritrix, for electronic records archivists to use in preserving digital files like WAV, PST, websites, and email.
Description: Late 2015, the beta version of the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab, a new digital platform providing access to digital resources across the Smithsonian alongside tools for teachers and students, launched. I was delighted to see a related social media update hinting at some of the discoveries to be had with the Learning Lab, one of which showed Saul Steinberg drawings on Smithsonian
Description: It does not take long for today’s visitors to one of the Smithsonian Institution’s nineteen museums to find themselves engulfed within the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. The flood of world’s fairs in the late nineteenth century played a central role in placing the Smithsonian en route to that unparalleled distinction. The New Orleans World’s
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8698,size=300,left]Today marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the opening of the Anacostia Community Museum (ACM), then called the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. The ACM opened in 1967 at the old Carver Theater in the Anacostia section of Washington, DC. The “experimental community museum” was first suggested by the Smithsonian’s eighth Secretary S.
Description: There is a remarkable figure in the Smithsonian’s history that doesn’t get much of the spotlight; Thomas W. Smillie. He served as the Smithsonian’s first official photographer from 1870 until his death in 1917, and additionally became the Smithsonian’s first photography curator in 1896. Smillie amassed a collection of photographic equipment starting with the purchase of the