Description: The Secretary’s Gold Medal for Exceptional Service was created in 1964 and is the highest honor given to Smithsonian staff for exceptional service over a long period of time. On December 4, 2014, Secretary G. Wayne Clough presented this award to Pam Henson for a lifetime of exceptional service to the Smithsonian Institution. She began her career here in 1973 and has been in
Description: In 1956, Helena M. Weiss received a letter asking for information about “how to capture them, also how to raise them… what to put them in, also what to feed them.” Interestingly, the letter-writer neglected to specify what he or she meant by “them,” leaving Weiss only to guess what exactly the inquiry was referring to. From 1948 to 1956, Weiss was Chief of the Office of
Description: At the Archives we get to see hundreds and hundreds (technically ~3 million if we wanted) images and photographs. We sometimes lose focus (ahh, get it) of all the amazing people behind the lens.National Photograph Month at the Archives
Description: In alignment with SI's newly launched Smithsonian Open Access, Smithsonian Institution Archives has designated over 2000 items as open access!
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
Description: On this day in 1850, a young man was killed in the Castle, the first of four deaths to occur within its walls. William H. Page was working in the building, which was still under construction at the time, when he fell to his death.
Description: To kick off Women's History month, a look at some of the women in humanities represented in the Smithsonian Institution Archives collections.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8807,size=250,left] In the institutional archivists' world, there is constant discussion about what we save and why we save it. While there are many reasons why this is such a pointed concern, one of the main factors institutions consider when deciding what to collect is the relevance of a collection's contents to the institution's mission.