Description: People everywhere are helping the Smithsonian Institution Archives make more of its collections deeply accessible through helping transcribe field books, journals, and diaries in our collections.
Description: As I write this crossover Preservation Week/MayDay post so close to Earth Day 2020 (the fiftieth anniversary), stunning news continues to break across the globe due to the coronavirus. Shining through the fog of worry, there have been surprising gains in a period of forced inactivity due to reduced emissions, such as record-breaking solar energy capture in Germany, and cleaner
Description: In 1917, police detectives arrested two suffragists suspected of planning a pro-suffrage demonstration at the United States National Museum.
Description: As the Preservation Intern at the Archives this summer, my main project was part of a massive re-organization of the oversized map cases at the Archives. An introduction to that project can be found in blog posts by previous interns, Caitria Sunderland and Margaret Rose Hunt. However, when taking breaks from the cool climate of collections storage, I worked on rehousing the
Description: Watch how we make invisible Beatles’ autographs visible with Reflectance Transform Imaging, a technique for forensic document examination.
Description: We’re taking a glimpse into the work and life of Margaret Sordahl and other women at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory stations around the world.
Description: In the early years of the National Museum of Natural History’s Insect Zoo, staff members, volunteers and their family ventured out to local field, streams and even monuments to collect specimens.
Description: What was the Saint Augustine Monster? According to Wikipedia, it was a globster—“an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water.” This great-grandaddy of globsters kept cryptozoologists speculating and scientists testing for a century—and a piece of it lives at the Smithsonian. The St. Augustine monster was discovered by two