Description: Unusual sized and shaped items can be a challenge in archives—here’s how our conservation staff dealt with a particularly tricky accession.
Description: In honor of Women's History Month, here is a brief biography of sorts about Viola S. Schantz, a prominent mammalogist who worked for the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service from 1918-1961.
Description: This Path We Travel: Celebrations of Contemporary Native American Creativity, was one of the inaugural exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center in New York City. The exhibition was a collaboration of fifteen Native American painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and dancers. The exhibition featured sculpture, performance, poetry,
Description: To celebrate Women’s History Month, here are two examples of 20th-century women who applied their education and expertise in geology and paleontology outside traditional university career paths.
Description: Rube Goldberg, the subject of a 1970 exhibition at the National Museum of American History, produced thousands of drawings and comic strips, as well as, films, photographs, and over-the-top machines. A true celebrity in his time, Goldberg set standards in political cartooning and contributed to the development of thousands of extravagant and entertaining contraptions that have
Description: Spectacular natural events, like eclipses, have long been the bread-and-butter of science journalism. Science Service, too, succumbed to the lure of combining colorful, firsthand descriptions with technical explanations.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_12123,size=250,left]It is a simple answer really: We counted. From 1978 to 1983, the Smithsonian undertook a comprehensive inventory of its collections. It was the first time the Smithsonian had ever tried to count each object in its collections and it was a massive task. Over five years, staff from every museum and research center spent thousands of
Description: New to the interwebs: a massive archive of 150 years of photography capturing Russian life from more than 40 institutions and collections. [via Hyperallergic]Nominate your favorite .gov website for the U.S. Federal Government End of Term Web Archive! [via The Signal, Library of Congress]Why save a computer virus, indeed?! [via The Conversation]Giant pandas are no longer
Description: Let’s learn about the history of Smithsonian Gardens’ annual orchid exhibit with a little help from former director Barbara Faust through her 2011 oral history interview.