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: In addition to a rich collection of analog moving image material currently being digitized, the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) accessions large quantities of born-digital video from various hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and websites across the Institution. And just as digitization is a method of preserving moving image content before it degrades on an analog carrier, digital
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Newspapers, by Quinn Cowper, Creative Commons: BY-NC-ND 2.0."][/caption] On May 20th, a flurry of reports took note of Google’s decisions to halt its ambitious efforts to digitize the contents of newspaper archives and make them online and at no cost.
Description: Smithsonian Directive 609 dated July 15, 2011, permits Smithsonian bureaus to charge fees for the right to reproduce and use images in their collections. This document establishes the policy and fees in effect at the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). The Smithsonian's policy on permissions for using digital media from the Smithsonian Institution Archives.