Description: I’ve been inspired by the snowflakes Wilson A. Bentley photographed through a microscope in the late 1800's ever since I first saw them in the Archives. Bentley donated 500 of his photographs to the Smithsonian in 1903 (you can read more about them in a post by Archives colleague, Courtney Esposito). The images capture nature at its most creative, mathematical, and elegant.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Bus Seats, by Adam Gerard, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License"][/caption] I took a stroll at lunch today since it’s that time of year again when the magnolia trees bloom in the Smithsonian Castle’s Enid Haupt Garden. It’s important to catch it before a rain or a big breeze snatches
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: Improved physical housing is one step you can take to help extend the life of your audiovisual media. Take a look at the new housing for lacquer transcription disc recordings from The World is Yours radio programs.
Description: In conservation it can be easy to overlook the content of an item and just get on with the treatment. Here is a case where overlooking the content was simply not possible.
Description: As one can expect, the complexity of digital video provides a few more factors to track and assess when compared with analog moving image counterparts in the archive.
Description: In order to broaden access to the Archives’ collections, and reduce the impact of frequent handling, the Archives is digitizing its most valuable and used collections. Here are the standards and specifications.