Smithsonian Institution Archives

Classical scholars have begun to delineate the dynamic pattern of black classicism. This new subfield of the classical tradition involves the analysis of the creative response to classical antiquity by artists as well as the history of the professional training in classics of scholars, teachers and students in high schools, colleges and universities. To the first group belongs Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880-1969). Born in Fayetteville, NC, Chesnutt was the second daughter of acclaimed African American novelist, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). She earned her B.A. from Smith College in 1902 and her M.A. in Latin from Columbia University in 1925. She was a member of the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Her life was spent teaching Latin at Central High School in Cleveland, OH. This is the first full scale account of her career.

Let us keep a place where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction." This was the response of a prominent North American naturalist opposed to a 1924 proposal to build facilities for women at the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory in Panama. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and as the United States built the Panama Canal, the American tropics became a major focus for North American politics and natural history, with government funding and logistical support from the military for scientific expeditions. As the North American western frontier closed, the New World tropics—or Neotropics—assumed the role that the West had played for an earlier generation of nineteenth-century explorers. In a post-Darwinian world, a field trip to the tropics with its rich biodiversity had become a rite of passage and a route to fame for young North American naturalists. And in the decades during and after the successful campaign for women's suffrage in the United States, tensions between men and women ran high, in the home, at the ballot box, and at the field station.

Over 40 years after the invention of email, relatively few institutions have developed policies, implementation strategies, procedures, tools and services that support the longterm preservation of records generated via this transformative communication mechanism. However, a close examination of recent literature reveals that significant progress has been achieved in developing the essential elements that can be used to build an effective email preservation programme. By implementing appropriate technical standards, new capture methods and emerging technologies, archivists, curators, records managers and other information professionals working in the cultural heritage sector can take practical steps to preserve email for its legal, administrative or historical value.

Journal Article Videohistory: Focusing on the American Past Get access Pamela M. Henson, Pamela M. Henson oral historian Smithsonian Institution Archives Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Terri A. Schorzman Terri A. Schorzman program manager Smithsonian Videohistory Program Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Pages 618–627, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079539 Published: 01 September 1991

The author summarizes and comments on the Archives Law of the People's Republic of China, which went into effect on 1 January 1988. He also notes the implementing regulations of 19 November 1990.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) will soon upload its 60 millionth page of open access biodiversity literature onto the BHL website and the BHL's Internet Archive Collection. The BHL’s massive repository of free knowledge includes content that is available nowhere else online, as well as accessible versions of content that are locked behind paywalls elsewhere. If we are to continue to expand our understanding of life on Earth, we must ensure that the foundation of biodiversity knowledge provided by BHL is discoverable by the tools we rely on to navigate the ever-expanding internet. These tools – search engines and their algorithms – preferentially deliver (and rank) content with good metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs). In modern online publishing, PID assignment and linking happens at the point of publication: DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for publications, ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) for people, and RORs (Research Organization Registry IDs) for organisations. The DOI system provided by Crossref (the DOI registration agency for scholarly content) delivers reciprocal citations, enabling convenient clicking from article to article, and citation tracking, enabling authors and institutions to track the impact and reach of their research output. Publications that lack PIDs, which include the vast majority of legacy literature, are hard to find and sit outside the linked network of scholarly research. This makes it nearly impossible to determine whether they are being cited, let alone viewed, mentioned, shared or liked. At TDWG 2020, Page 2020, Kearney 2020, Richard 2020 (and 2019, Page 2019b, Page 2019a, Kearney 2019b, Kearney 2019a and 2018, Kearney 2018), we emphasised the need to bring the historic biodiversity literature into the modern linked network of scholarly research. In October 2020, BHL launched a new working group to do exactly this. The BHL Persistent Identifier Working Group (Team #RetroPID) brings together expertise from across BHL’s global community. Over the past year, we have worked tirelessly to make it easier to find, cite, link, share and track the content on BHL, adding article-level metadata to journals and retrospectively assigning DOIs (#RetroPIDs). Most importantly, we have developed the tools and documentation that will enable the entire BHL community to take contributed content from “just” accessible to persistently discoverable. This paper will detail our efforts to retrofit the historic literature (a square peg) into the modern PID system (a round hole) and will present both the achievements and the challenges of this important work.

"COMPENDIUM OF IMAGE ERRORS IN ANALOGUE VIDEO." Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 53(2), pp. 140–141

Abstract Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963) is widely regarded as the founder of Afro‐American anthropology. From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, he and his wife Frances produced an impressive body of research materials and scholarly publications on African and Afro‐American cultures, ‘virtually ignored among these materials is some 4,000 feet of motion picture footage and thousands of still photographs. This paper discusses Herskovits’ interest in using film records for studying body movement, gestures, and patterns of expressive behavior as persistent elements of the African heritage in the New World. The construction and style of imaging in two of his edited films is also discussed in relation to Herskovits’ scholarship and social and intellectual factors which prevailed at the time. Notes I would like to thank Jean Herskovits for permission to reproduce her father's photographs and Howard Dobson of the Schomberg Center for providing me with copies of the film log and accompanying notes kept by Melville Herskovits during his West African research. I also thank Sidney Mintz, Steve Feld, Ira Jacknis, Wendy Shay, Pamela Wintle, and Patricia Zimmerman for their comments and suggestions on the draft paper.

By the mid-19th century, astronomy in the United States was productive and growing. Information gathered by and at the behest of the Smithsonian Institution shows that the community consisted of approximately 50 individuals, including a significant number of military officers, and a dozen observatories. Americans were deeply involved in astronomical research, and the discipline was entrenched in the college curriculum. What the discipline lacked was an adequate publication vehicle to ensure refereed, rapid dissemination of observations.

De leur collaboration fructueuse sur l’un des films les plus marquants de l’histoire cinématographique, 2001 : L’odyssée de l’Espace (1964-1968) jusqu’à leur tentative avortée, dans les années 90, pour développer une histoire inspirée de la nouvelle Supertoys Last All Summer Long de Brian Aldiss (finalement adaptée par Steven Spielberg avec I.A.: Intelligence Artificielle), Stanley Kubrick et Arthur C. Clarke entretinrent une longue amitié jusqu’à leur mort, qui fut décrite comme un « heureux mariage cérébral » ; les deux hommes se stimulaient l’un l’autre en s’échangeant des idées et se lançant des défis, et ce depuis la première lettre écrite par le réalisateur le 31 mars 1964, dans laquelle il fait part de son intention de collaborer avec l’auteur pour créer « le tant attendu “premier chef d’œuvre” de science-fiction au cinéma ».La relation qui s’établit entre l’écrivain et le cinéaste, essentiellement envisagée à travers le prisme des déclarations de Clarke au sujet du tournage de 2001 dans ses Mémoires, fut souvent décrite comme difficile voire conflictuelle, en accord avec l’image d’Épinal de Kubrick, le « génie dictatorial ». Grâce à l’étude de la correspondance conservée aux Archives Stanley Kubrick ainsi que dans la collection Arthur C. Clarke récemment ouverte au musée Smithsonian de l’état de Virginie, cet article propose de réexplorer cette collaboration en se concentrant sur certains moments cruciaux dans l’évolution du script de 2001 ainsi que sur les problèmes liés à la publication du roman éponyme. Enfin, nous reviendrons sur la seconde collaboration des deux artistes, actuellement peu étudiée, lors de l’adaptation de Supertoys ; nous pourrons ainsi comparer ces deux expériences et considérer les évolutions quant aux attitudes, aux méthodes de travail et aux intérêts du duo à travers le temps.

Utilizing crowdsourcing to make an organization's cultural heritage material more accessible can be a cumbersome and resource-intensive process. Without a digitization workflow designed to facilitate the use of image sets in multiple ways on a variety of platforms, large-scale crowdsourcing would be out of reach for the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). However, such a workflow can also be a natural extension of regular operations. SIA's incorporation of crowdsourcing preparation into its normal digital preservation and access operations demonstrates how an organization can achieve higher levels of audience engagement and acquire high-quality enriched data while avoiding heavy impacts to existing staff resources. This brief article outlines digitization workflows, material selection, and the underpinning principles and practices that the SIA employs and offers these as one possibility for organizations to consider before embarking on such a project.

Abstract The Smithsonian's Field Book Project presents a “fusion” of metadata standards to meet the access needs of a diverse user base and to set the framework for establishing best practices for managing field book collections. The key access challenges around field books stem from a lack of best practices when it comes to collection management and description. Field books are unique materials that sometimes fall under the auspices of departmental libraries or laboratories (item level description), sometimes archives (collection level description) and just as often can be found intermingled and uncataloged in museum collections and curators' offices (little to no description). These varying forms of custodianship result in collection management and descriptive practices that are not consistent across or even within institutions. The Field Book Project draws on existing standards and community input to develop a structured online resource for contributing and locating field book content. This poster provides examples of user needs related to field books; illustrates the use of different metadata schemas within the system and how they have been linked together to bridge collection and item level descriptions; and invites discussion on the potential impacts in terms of establishing best practices, improving access, and leveraging the technological capabilities of XML to expand content and features in the future.

With limited staff resources, the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) in the early 2000s embarked on a new process to reveal the stories, people, and places embedded in their collections that document the history of the Smithsonian. This article looks at the earliest initiatives of publishing item-level digital collections that set the stage for hidden stories to rise to the surface through the public's engagement with materials in the Transcription Center. Such forms of engagement have included transcribing the SIA field books, following the SIA on various social media channels, and demonstrating interest in the “Women in Science Wednesday” campaign—all of which have enabled us to carry our message to new audiences and to enrich the information we had about our collections, something that would not have been possible with the SIA's small staff.

A refugee from Lithuania, Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019) arrived in the U.S. in 1947 and built a successful career in the competitive, male-dominated post-World War II New York’s art world. Beginning with small ceramic tile artworks that evolved into multi-media mosaics, Kasuba’s artistic vision expanded to shaping architectural spaces. From 1953 to 1970, appearances in exhibitions organized by the Museum of Contemporary Craft introduced her art to American and international audiences. Her pivotal solo exhibition at an important New York gallery in 1966 led to complex collaborations with noted architects for projects in major U. S. cities. Her innovative monumental designs in marble, brick and granite were focal points of public buildings and spaces. This article examines her key commissions completed from 1970 to 1986 in Chicago, New York City, Rochester, N.Y., Buffalo, N.Y., and Washington, D.C.

The archival profession today is doubly challenged. Not only must we deal with dramatic increases in the volume and complexity of paper records, we must also develop programs and strategies for electronic records. The latter, in particular, will require years of research, analysis, testing, and development. However, the resources needed to support years of intensive work in multiple archival settings are not present. The author contends that the profession's most pressing need is the development of greater infrastructure to support research efforts, and she offers examples of the types of organizations that we need to foster.

The Smithsonian Institution Archives is responsible for the Smithsonian's records of enduring value. Though the Institution was aware of the need to keep certain records permanently (dating back to 1852) and an archivist was first assigned the task of maintaining records and special collections in 1891, the first modern archives program did not begin until 1967. From its very beginning the Smithsonian collected personal papers and special collections and this trend has been continued by the Smithsonian Archives.

The preparation of this work was expedited by the generous help of a number of colleagues whom we would like to take this opportunity to thank for their assistance.Iraj Afshar patiently responded with clarity and authority to numerous questions about technical aspects of the translation such as the identification of the many obscure places and people in Iran mentioned by Farâhâni.Mohammad Taqi Daneshpazhu helped with various textual problems, as did Mohammad Moghaddam, who also provided a copy of a rare semi-autobiographical work by Farâhâni.Farâhâni's son, Khan Malik Sasani, offered valuable information about his father's life

Book Reviews Get access WILLIAM B. PROVINE . Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology. Science and Its Conceptual Foundation Series.Chicago, Illinois, The University of Chicago Press, 1986. xvi, 554 pp., illus. $30.00, and SEWALL WRIGHT . Evolution: Selected Papers. Ed., William B. Provine. Chicago, Illinois, University of Chicago Press, 1986. xiv, 649 pp., illus. $70.00, $25.00 (paper). PAMELA HENSON PAMELA HENSON Historian Smithsonian Institution ArchivesWashington, D.C. 20560 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 43, Issue 1, January 1988, Pages 106–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/43.1.106 Published: 01 January 1988

"I’m Still Surviving. Jennifer Brier, project director. History Moves, 2020." The Oral History Review, 48(2), pp. 273–274