Description: In celebration of over a century of volunteer contributions at the Smithsonian, explore the work of some stellar volunteers from our collection.
Description: This blog post was edited in October 2021 for clarification. While surveying and collecting specimens in the Aleutian Islands in 1871-1872 for the United States Coast Survey, later renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, naturalist William Healey Dall befriended George Tsaroff (1858-1880), an Unangan (Aleut) teen from Unalaska Island who had been hired as local
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="368" caption="Interior of Office of Printing and Photographic Service's cold storage vault, 1983, by Richard K. Hofmeister, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371 Box 4 Folder September 1983, Negative Number 2004-10338."][/caption] To be sure, the Smithsonian has a lot of photographs. Millions of them in hundreds of
Description: Explore what happened in 1969 when a man brought a hatchet and butcher knife to Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to attack a display of snakes.
Description: An international community of researchers and practitioners are driving the professional practice of digital preservation towards greater maturity and opening doors to new levels of 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