Description: In alignment with SI's newly launched Smithsonian Open Access, Smithsonian Institution Archives has designated over 2000 items as open access!
Description: With the ongoing reorganization of the map cases at the Archives, collections containing panoramic photographs, drawings, and maps require unique housing that provides adequate support when storing and handling.
Description: It’s Preservation Week - see what conservation staff at the Smithsonian Institution Archives are doing to contribute to preservation-mindedness.
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: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="368" caption="Interior of Office of Printing and Photographic Service's cold storage vault, 1983, by Richard K. Hofmeister, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371 Box 4 Folder September 1983, Negative Number 2004-10338."][/caption] To be sure, the Smithsonian has a lot of photographs. Millions of them in hundreds of
Description: When you’re all gathered together, sometimes there are just too many cooks in the kitchen, or younger siblings underfoot. Not everyone is into football or jigsaw puzzles, so why not gather together a couple of people from separate generations and branches of the family tree and do some photo identification and preservation? Set aside an hour between or after the meal to pull
Description: As we digitize the Archives’ collections to make them available online, I am constantly being exposed to handwriting from the past two centuries. As a result, I have a deeper appreciatiation of how many different things influence the way a person’s writing appears on the page, things beyond the quality of their penmanship. Writing on the deck of a ship, on horseback or on
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Photo shoebox upset, by Stephen Cummings, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] I recently took a position as photograph archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and hope to be able to share through this blog some of the processes we are undertaking to make our photographic collections more useful and