Description: In November 1938, Science News Letter published a story on Enrico Fermi winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, running a headshot of the professor. It's the kind of photo found in a passport—Fermi is looking forward with not much of a smile. The next question a historian would ask is did Science Service, the publisher, hire one of its photographers to take the photo, or acquire
Description: Though a large part of our collections are flat—that is, they are unbound materials as opposed to bound, three-dimensional objects—a significant group of our holdings do live in bindings and book structures (some of my previous blog contributions have dealt with books, but none with as great a degree of intervention). Treating a field book became more complicated—and more
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Photo shoebox upset, by Stephen Cummings, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] I recently took a position as photograph archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and hope to be able to share through this blog some of the processes we are undertaking to make our photographic collections more useful and
Description: During this Women’s History Month, the Smithsonian Transcription Center has been highlighting projects from women around the Smithsonian. Among these women is Margaret Collins, a pioneering scientist and civil rights activist. While her fieldwork has been written about previously, that is clearly just one part of a full and distinguished career.Collins’ interest in science