Description: If you are a regular reader, or someone who works for a museum, library, or archive, you intimately understand the difficulty in managing big collections. If you’re not in this world, you do understand how hard it is to manage family photographs, a collection of email love letters, or the folder tucked in the bottom of your closet with old college papers. When you multiply
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives contributes images to a new website about the Burgess Shale, a paleontological site located in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, by Royal Ontario Museum and Parks Canada.
Description: Travel with us to the Galapagos and the Marshall Islands as we launch some warm-weather scientific field books, diaries, and correspondence. While it’s not very wintery in Washington D.C., we’re hoping this will offer an escape to those entering the long remaining months of snow, sleet, and ice. And if you’re avoiding the cold, what a better way to spend your time than helping
Description: Artists are often among the researchers who comb through archives in search of inspiration and content. A few years back in 2008, an encyclopedic exhibition, Archive Fever, presented at the International Center of Photography in New York, presented works by leading contemporary artists who have made active use of archival images, documents, and methodology to explore the ways
Description: Each week, the Archives features a woman who has been a groundbreaker at the Smithsonian, past or present, in a series titled Wonderful Women Wednesday.
Description: [caption id="attachment_1679" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Untitled (Drive-In: Circle Theatre), Steve Fitch, 1976, Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection"][/caption] Media and transportation seem forever linked. As I wrote in a previous post, the portable camera and the bicycle made a very nice pairing in their early years at the turn of the 20th century.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="442" caption="A group of scientists leaves Barro Colorado Island in a small boat, during 1923, Smithsonian staff were in Panama with the Institute for Research in Tropical America, a group of private foundations and universities under the auspices of the National Research Council, who first established a research laboratory on Barro
Description: Though photographs are accepted as subjective but ultimately faithful visual reproductions of reality, in many instances they don’t correspond to our experience. Pupils don’t regularly glint red, and people don’t transform into the streaked, evanescent smears we so often witness in photos. Yet we have no trouble accepting these inconsistencies, knowing that taking a picture of
Description: Vicarious research is one of the great joys of the reference desk at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. From our front-row (well, only-row) seat outside the reading room, we catch tantalizing glimpses of our patrons’ manifold research topics.The reference team fields around 6,000 queries per year. Ask us what people have been researching recently, and you’ll get into some