Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley (1913-2001) riding a scooter at the 1974 Folklife Festival in the Mississippi delta section, with a cotton field behind him, by Unidentified photographer, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 613, Box 269, Folder: SDR Photos, Negative number:
Description: The Smithsonian’s Field Book Project is a continuous fount of work for both our digitization crew here at the Archives and for me as the conservator in charge of the project’s physical needs. Over the past several weeks I have worked on a variety of field books with different structures and treatment requirements, and will share a few of the most common features I’ve seen in
Description: Welcome to Throwback Thursday! This holiday season, I hope to inspire you to take a trip down memory lane to the land of erstwhile and bygone days of the family photo album. What better time to pull these one of a kind treasures off the shelves than during the family festivities! Recently over the Thanksgiving holiday, I rediscovered my own family’s quasi-prehistoric,
Description: In celebration of Preservation Week, we’ll take a look at a recently created custom housing for a fragile fabric-covered box found within Accession 18-009.
Description: In conservation it can be easy to overlook the content of an item and just get on with the treatment. Here is a case where overlooking the content was simply not possible.
Description: This month, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, along with many other archives across the Smithsonian and around the nation, will be celebrating American Archives Month. The purpose of this celebration is "to raise awareness about the value of archives and archivists." We write a lot about what an archivist does on this blog, but, for those of you who don't know and are
Description: Providing suitable housing for collections can sometimes be cost-prohibitive. When the Archives received a large collection of oversized drawings, a cost-savings approach had to be employed while still achieving an appropriate housing strategy for long-term preservation.
Description: Science Service photographs, while having good identifying information, can still be helped by the cybercommunity to fill in some of the mission information.