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: Even with help from the dedicated Flickr Commons community, there are still many more images to identify in the Ruel Pardee Tolman Flickr set.
Description: Listen to reenactments of two articles that were published in the 1936 Smithsonian Annual Report as broadcast during The World Is Yours episode “Smithsonian Annual Report of Scientific Progress.”
Description: A clause in the last will and testament of English scientist James Smithson eventually led to his estate being left to the United States "to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” There was much debate as to what constituted such an establishment, but many of the proposals
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: I’ve been inspired by the snowflakes Wilson A. Bentley photographed through a microscope in the late 1800's ever since I first saw them in the Archives. Bentley donated 500 of his photographs to the Smithsonian in 1903 (you can read more about them in a post by Archives colleague, Courtney Esposito). The images capture nature at its most creative, mathematical, and elegant.
Description: Here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, we take pride in preserving the Institution’s history, including its sizable web presence. While various offices at the Smithsonian create and back up the contents of their websites, the Archives also crawls each website using Heritrix, an open-source tool created by the Internet Archive, to capture content in an archival format.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="314" caption="The Amb. Richard B. Parker Photographs contains 200 black and white prints, 481 black and white negatives, and two black and white contact sheets of Islamic monuments in Algeria, Cairo, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, and Spain, 1965-1979, by Richard Bordeaux Parker, Unknown medium, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.