Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Taxes, by Mat Honan, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0 Generic."][/caption] Chances are that, if you live in the United States, you've recently filed your taxes. For most, filing tax returns is a dreaded task, even when you expect a refund. Doing taxes requires a lot of time and energy, and often results in some
Description: [caption id="attachment_4168" align="aligncenter" width="261" caption="Albumen portrait of the Reverend Levi L. Hill, Baptist minister and early daguerreotypist, West Kill, New York and New York City, b. 1816-d. February 9, 1865. Inscription on reverse, “Levi L. Hill, Died February 9, 1865, He is Asleep in Heaven.”"][/caption] Just when we think that we must have at last
Description: Welcome to the newly refreshed Smithsonian Institution Archives website! As our regular visitors may have noticed, we launched a new theme for our site on September 27, 2017. Our previous Drupal theme was first launched in 2011 when we moved our site over to Drupal. Since that time, we have upgraded the backend, made improvements to our searching, and increased the
Description: Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="World War II. Liberation of Holland. Dutch people waving at allied planes, The Netherlands, location unknown, 1945, Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo, SFA001015927. "][/caption] During WWII, many spots in Holland were liberated in April of 1945. Check out some of the National Archief’s new set of Flickr Commons photos
Description: Photshopping, Victorian-style. [via PetaPixel]A suitable home for an automotive archive; the General Motors historic carriage factory, Durant-Dort Factory One. [via Today's Motor Vehicles]New to the official Oxford Dictionary lexicon; manspreading, MacGyver, and Awesomesauce. [via InfoDocket]A massive treasure-trove of historic maps is now mobile! [via InfoDocket]50 years of
Description: For forty years, Miss Helena Weiss kept the Smithsonian running smoothly as a clerk, stenographer, director of the Office of Correspondence and Documents, and Registrar. When she retired, her position was divided into seven separate jobs.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Fingers typing, by Simon Steiner, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."] [/caption] You know that sinking, then maddening feeling: you need to find something you’ve carefully put away, but can’t remember where you’ve stored it or how you characterized or labeled it. That common problem, when it’s blown up to institutional
Description: Masks and endless sanitizing again? What has the Smithsonian done during past pandemics? We’ll look back to the public health emergency in 1918.
Description: Institutions devise all sorts of procedures to determine what kinds of documents to collect, and how to save and archive them. The Smithsonian Institution Archives, for example, advises and works with various museums, research institutes, and offices across the Smithsonian, on an ongoing basis, to determine and manage what will get archived for posterity. But in some