Description: Uta C. Merzbach was the Smithsonian's first curator of mathematical instruments. She brought her field to life with unique presentations of mathematical concepts and computer history.
Description: This blog post was edited in October 2021 for clarification. While surveying and collecting specimens in the Aleutian Islands in 1871-1872 for the United States Coast Survey, later renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, naturalist William Healey Dall befriended George Tsaroff (1858-1880), an Unangan (Aleut) teen from Unalaska Island who had been hired as local
Description: Known lovingly by the public as the “Panda Lady,” Lisa Stevens cultivated a rich thirty-year career at the National Zoological Park as the senior curator of mammals.
Description: Details of a physical inventory/survery that is ongoing at the Smithsonian. The project is focused on finding and documenting born digital items at different archival units.
Description: In August 1996, the Smithsonian marked its 150th anniversary with a huge birthday celebration on the National Mall. For its sesquicentennial, a term which this author constantly forgets no matter how many times she looks it up, the Institution threw itself a two-day birthday party, sprinkled with special exhibit tents, concerts, nineteen birthday cakes, a special website, and
Description: In addition to a rich collection of analog moving image material currently being digitized, the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) accessions large quantities of born-digital video from various hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and websites across the Institution. And just as digitization is a method of preserving moving image content before it degrades on an analog carrier, digital
Description: With Chinese New Year upon us, the beautiful stationery these letters are written on gives a glimpse into life for academic expatriates in southern China in the 1920s.