Description: What does the Smithsonian Institution Archives collect? We say we hold records about the history of the Smithsonian and its people, programs, research, and activities. But this answer doesn’t quite do justice to the breadth and depth of our holdings.The reference team fields around 6,000 queries per year. Ask us what people have been researching recently, and you'll get into
Description: In November 1938, Science News Letter published a story on Enrico Fermi winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, running a headshot of the professor. It's the kind of photo found in a passport—Fermi is looking forward with not much of a smile. The next question a historian would ask is did Science Service, the publisher, hire one of its photographers to take the photo, or acquire
Description: [caption id="attachment_10342" align="alignleft" width="228" caption="Miss Willey Glover DeNis, (1879-1929), Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2008-0987."][/caption] At the Archives, we often run across images that have minimal information associated with them. Sometimes it’s a number or a name (usually incomplete) or a year. It is rare to find a beautifully complete