Description: Note: I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks, so look for Link Love to start again on July 22nd! We’ve been blogging about the Civil War and the Smithsonian for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, and others across the Smithsonian have been doing the same. Over at NPR’s Picture show blog, photography curator Shannon Perich shares some incredible animated Civil War-era
Description: The Archives was recently gifted an 1860 letter from Spencer F. Baird, second Secretary of the Smithsonian, to George N. Lawrence, fellow naturalist. The donor requested that, along with a digital version, a transcription be provided, which I undertook alongside a simple treatment. The letter was in overall excellent condition: the thin paper exhibited only a pair of small
Description: [caption id="attachment_2239" align="aligncenter" width="324" caption="881. View of the cliff of Mount Burgess from the west slope of Mount Field, three (3) miles north of Field on the Canadian Pacific Railway (British Columbia, Canada). By C.D. Walcott, 1910. 4 x 5" kodak film. Digital image taken directly from nitrate negative.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Salman Rushdie's archives, featured in an Emory University publication, by Georgia Popplewell, Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic."][/caption] Back in October I talked—with great interest and at length—with Anne Van Camp, director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, about the various
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Beauty is forever, by Just Warr, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0 Generic."][/caption] At THE BIGGER PICTURE, we often write about the challenges of maintaining the data in digital archives. But a recent article bundled in the informative daily arts newsletter compiled by Jeff Weiss—you can subscribe by sending a request
Description: As Summer 2021 winds down, we'll take a look at some examples of the breadth of work and collections that are represented at the Smithsonian Institution.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="311" caption="IC 4970 and NGC 6872: Galaxy Collision Switches on Black Hole, X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/M.Machacek; Optical: ESO/VLT; Infrared: NASA/JPL/Caltech."][/caption] I’m sure you’re familiar with beauties, like the one above, from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Well, apparently, with “a basic understanding of astronomy data & image
Description: In November, Smithsonian Institution Archives moved over 3 million photographic negatives to a new state of the art facility at the Smithsonian Institution Support Center (SISC) in Hyattsville, Maryland.