Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives will be celebrating African American History Month throughout February with a series of related posts on THE BIGGER PICTURE.
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives will be celebrating African American History Month throughout February with a series of related posts on THE BIGGER PICTURE. When I interviewed Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, as part of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative’s online project click! photography changes
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
Description: When institutions archive data, they capture and organize it in digital formats that make the most sense to them, based upon their specific group of users, needs, and technical options that are available at a given point in time. But what happens if, for example, institutions decide that it makes sense to enhance their mission by their presenting data collections in less
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Salman Rushdie's archives, featured in an Emory University publication, by Georgia Popplewell, Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic."][/caption] Back in October I talked—with great interest and at length—with Anne Van Camp, director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, about the various
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="251" caption="Untitled, 1890, by Thomas Smillie, Cyanotype, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Thomas Smillie Collection (Record Unit 95), Image ID: RU95_Box77_0021."][/caption] It’s inevitable. Whenever someone tries to recount or evoke photography’s impact on visual culture when Daguerreotypes were introduced in 1839, a statement
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="368" caption="Cybill Shepherd at the "Castle" during the filming of "Chances Are," where she plays an SI curator, 1988, by Jeff Tinsley, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371, Box 5, Negative Number: 88-10752-31. "][/caption] The frequency with which the words “curator” and “curating” pop up continues to