Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="360" caption="Steven Cohn, the Smithsonian’s Office of Safety, Health and Environmental Management and the museum’s representative Industrial Hygienist, tests Owney's fur for arsenic, lead and mercury. Courtesy of the National Postal Museum "Pushing the Envelope" blog."][/caption] More interesting preservation challenges. We’ve covered
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="454" caption="At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Saint Louis, Missouri, 1904, Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum exhibit includes the Langley Aerodrome, a model of a whale suspended from the ceiling, natural history exhibits, archaeological objects, and industrial machines, The Smithsonian coordinated all of the
Description: Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
Description: It would be hard to imagine stepping into a Smithsonian museum today and not seeing a single camera. Digital cameras and smart phones with cameras are so completely a part of today’s museum-going experience that - unless a flash goes off in your face – you probably wouldn’t notice the camera next to you. However, in 1938, you would have seen a very different sight. On August
Description: A new exhibition offers a chance to explore the world of Grand Tour travel in the late eighteenth century, similar to that experienced by the Smithsonian’s own founding donor, James Smithson.
Description: Institutions devise all sorts of procedures to determine what kinds of documents to collect, and how to save and archive them. The Smithsonian Institution Archives, for example, advises and works with various museums, research institutes, and offices across the Smithsonian, on an ongoing basis, to determine and manage what will get archived for posterity. But in some
Description: The history of the Smithsonian’s Children’s Room, a project led by Smithsonian Secretary Langley and famous interior designer Grace Lincoln Temple.