Description: The Smithsonian’s Field Book Project is a continuous fount of work for both our digitization crew here at the Archives and for me as the conservator in charge of the project’s physical needs. Over the past several weeks I have worked on a variety of field books with different structures and treatment requirements, and will share a few of the most common features I’ve seen in
Description: This spring, the Archives welcomed Heather Weiss, a Project SEARCH intern, and as her time with us comes to an end, we wanted to highlight her accomplishments.
Description: When a television channel asks to film our collections, we want to show them at their best. Read how we accommodate media requests while keeping our collections safe.
Description: Handwriting is a personal passion of mine, despite it having become something of a lost art. Today, when most people think of handwriting at all, it is as a greatly individual method of writing recognizable characters, regardless of the writing system, but in the past, when you could make a living as a scribe, there were highly standardized styles.
Description: It’s Preservation Week - see what conservation staff at the Smithsonian Institution Archives are doing to contribute to preservation-mindedness.
Description: With Chinese New Year upon us, the beautiful stationery these letters are written on gives a glimpse into life for academic expatriates in southern China in the 1920s.
Description: One of our recent projects, these photographic crayon enlargements, associated with founder of the National Zoo William Temple Hornaday, were made on sensitized paper that was then adhered to a linen “canvas” stretched around wooden frames. The paper had become brittle, and handling at some point in the past led to a number of punctures and tears through both the paper and the
Description: We all have the opportunity to support the Smithsonian—come see how the Libraries and Archives Adopt-a-Book program offers a chance to do so.