Description: Here at the Smithsonian we love to observe. So of course on August 23, 2011, at 1:51 PM, when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the Washington, DC region and many of us with it, we immediately started to observe what happened and how we could document it. As the Institution's historians, inevitably we needed to know, had this happened before and what were the effects? After
Description: The choice to create duplicate copies of collection material is often made for both preservation and access considerations. For some media, such as audiovisual materials, digitization is preservation. For fragile or actively deteriorating paper and photographic collections, a digital surrogate can be made to preserve the content and provide a stable copy for