Description: To celebrate the Smithsonian Institution’s 175th birthday this August, we’re going to test your Smithsonian history knowledge every week on Instagram and Twitter.
Description: Here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, we take pride in preserving the Institution’s history, including its sizable web presence. While various offices at the Smithsonian create and back up the contents of their websites, the Archives also crawls each website using Heritrix, an open-source tool created by the Internet Archive, to capture content in an archival format.
Description: Aerial images of Washington D.C. from the Boston Public LIbrary. [via Ghosts of DC]Digital maps from University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab and Stamen Design showing social, political, and economic movements in America. [via Smithsonian Magazine]How do you move over 800 space and aviation models? [via Air Space Blog]Perhaps forecasting a new fashion trend, "Design a
Description: For the month of March, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will be posting new photos of women scientists to the Flickr Commons and highlighting these women in blog posts on THE BIGGER PICTURE, in honor of Women's History Month.[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="An unidentified woman (possibly Alice Haskins) sitting with U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Description: [caption id="attachment_10342" align="alignleft" width="228" caption="Miss Willey Glover DeNis, (1879-1929), Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2008-0987."][/caption] At the Archives, we often run across images that have minimal information associated with them. Sometimes it’s a number or a name (usually incomplete) or a year. It is rare to find a beautifully complete
Description: There's no doubt that Washington, D.C. is a great place to raise kids. And one of the primary reasons why is the wide array of Smithsonian museums that are only a subway ride away. It's no wonder that regular visits to the National Mall have been an important part of our family's culture and history since the early 1970's. And part of that history has been the story of "how
Description: Sometimes a single picture or new piece of information can open a window to a whole new perspective. In my case, it was a couple of sentences—spoken at a recent presentation at the Best Practices Exchange 2010 conference in Phoenix, Arizona—that turned out to be revelatory. The conference was a gathering of archivists, librarians, record managers, and digital curators whose
Description: Late in July, LENS, a New York Times blog that focuses on images and issues photographic, posted an interesting story by James Estrin. Magnum Photos, the legendary co-operative photo agency founded after World War II by photographers including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson, announced that to boost the visibility (and paid use) of the hundreds of thousands of images it