Description: An examination of logbooks in the Smithsonian Institution Archives reveals the multiple ways that the Division of Inquiry in the United States Commission of Fish performed scientific work at marine laboratories in the early 20th century to fulfill their expansive mission statement.
Description: Handwriting is a personal passion of mine, despite it having become something of a lost art. Today, when most people think of handwriting at all, it is as a greatly individual method of writing recognizable characters, regardless of the writing system, but in the past, when you could make a living as a scribe, there were highly standardized styles.
Description: Spencer F. Baird and George Brown Goode used their diverse, and sometimes quirky, contacts from the U.S. Fish Commission to fill exhibit cabinets in the U.S. National Museum.
Description: People everywhere are helping the Smithsonian Institution Archives make more of its collections deeply accessible through helping transcribe field books, journals, and diaries in our collections.
Description: Closed to the public since 2004, the Arts and Industries Building remains closed for the foreseeable future. Here is a look back at what used to be there.
Description: As we digitize the Archives’ collections to make them available online, I am constantly being exposed to handwriting from the past two centuries. As a result, I have a deeper appreciatiation of how many different things influence the way a person’s writing appears on the page, things beyond the quality of their penmanship. Writing on the deck of a ship, on horseback or on