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: Since our move to Smithsonian Institution Support Center, in the fall of 2015, the Archives have been able to work on longer-term projects using the photographic negatives stored in our cold storage vault. One of these projects is systematically scanning the collection of glass plate negatives from the United States National Museum, Division of Graphic Arts Photograph
Description: Very early "big data" tracking mortality rates in 17th-century London. [via Smithsonian Magazine]The Mellon Foundation has funded an $887,000 project to develop community-driven archives! [via Info Docket]See what questions archivists across the country answered yesterday for #AskAnArchivist. [via SAA]What album would you be....if you could preserve yourself in a vinyl record.
Description: Ouch — the Society of Women Engineers has a collection of rejection letters sent to women attempting to gain entry to engineering programs. [via Atlantic]A new discovery of 300,000 year old remains of Homo sapiens shows that our species evolved in multiple locations on the African continent. [via NY Times]iNaturalist.org is launching an app that will help you identify plants
Description: …in which a member of the Archives staff turns her passion for sloths into a mission to research their history at the Smithsonian Institution.
Description: This is the latest post in our "Hot Topix" series. In each quarterly edition we show you what the reference team has been up to, and bring you some of the more notable inuqires we have received.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
Description: Preservation intern discusses working with oversize materials in the Archives collection, including information on the creation of custom enclosures, surface cleaning of blueprints, and humidification.