Description: Planning a museum or gallery exhibition takes a lot of work as seen through exhibition records that contain images, layouts, object labels, memos, and other important materials.
Description: Tracing the history of the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, created in 1966 to raise funds to support the Institution, especially its educational programs.
Description: Sometimes a single picture or new piece of information can open a window to a whole new perspective. In my case, it was a couple of sentences—spoken at a recent presentation at the Best Practices Exchange 2010 conference in Phoenix, Arizona—that turned out to be revelatory. The conference was a gathering of archivists, librarians, record managers, and digital curators whose
Description: [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Ralph Waldo Emerson, between 1860 and 1870, by J. W. Black & Co., Photographic print on carte-de-visite mount, Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer family papers, 1851-1999 bulk 1881-1950, Archives of American Art, Digital ID: 5677. "][/caption] From the beginning, photography upset conventional ideas about the relationship
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="424" caption="U.S. National Museum, May 3, 1917, seen from the National Mall, by Unknown photographer, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 45, Box 79, Folder: 10, Neg. SIA2009-2203."][/caption] As part of my work as the historian for the history of the Smithsonian, I’ve been working for the past year on