Description: Discusses the opening of an exhibit When Time and Duty Permit: Smithsonian Collecting in World War II and the correspondence files that will be displayed.
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: A new exhibition offers a chance to explore the world of Grand Tour travel in the late eighteenth century, similar to that experienced by the Smithsonian’s own founding donor, James Smithson.
Description: Reminiscences of Frank A. Taylor, founding director of the National Museum of American History which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
Description: If you are a regular reader, or someone who works for a museum, library, or archive, you intimately understand the difficulty in managing big collections. If you’re not in this world, you do understand how hard it is to manage family photographs, a collection of email love letters, or the folder tucked in the bottom of your closet with old college papers. When you multiply
Description: Have you ever wondered why museums choose the exhibition topics they do? These are the kinds of questions that the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ historic records of exhibitions can sometimes help us answer. An idea could stem from the personal interest of a curator, reflect an institution’s holdings, be inspired by comments from a visitor, or be designed around a specific
Description: On Monday, October 27th, four of our finest were available on the Smithsonian's Facebook page to answer questions about preserving your own archival collections. The four archivists at the Q&A have specialties in the preservation and organization of audio/visual material, photos, and digital records (email, digital video, etc.) This is our fourth year hosting this event and
Description: [caption id="attachment_9678" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="View of the Archives Fair setup, October 22, 2010."][/caption] We are going to be live blogging from the Smithsonian Archives Fair this morning and profiling all of the activities that will be going on today. Stay tuned throughout the day to see what's going on. [caption id="attachment_9680"