Description: Here at the Smithsonian we love to observe. So of course on August 23, 2011, at 1:51 PM, when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the Washington, DC region and many of us with it, we immediately started to observe what happened and how we could document it. As the Institution's historians, inevitably we needed to know, had this happened before and what were the effects? After
Description: I was recently given the opportunity to work as a Collections Care Intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives for the months of November and December 2015, under the supervision and partnership of the Archives’ Collections Care Team. During my short time here, I worked on two parallel projects focused on surveying, preserving, and treating oversized archival collections:
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
Description: [caption id="attachment_564" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Taft Voting, by Bain News Service, publisher, 1912, Library of Congress, LC-B2- 2442-16"][/caption] It’s against the law to photograph certain things, at certain times, in certain places. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently reported that a photograph of an election ballot in a mayoral race—showing the name