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Families by Scurlock
It has been really fun for me to watch people’s reactions when I reveal that I spent my summer looking at pictures at the Smithsonian. Of course, it’s much more than that, but the bulk of my time was...
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Zora Neale Hurston: Her Eyes Were on Anthropology
Zora Neale Hurston was an important part of the Harlem Renaissance and is perhaps best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But did you know she was also an anthropologist? Hurston...
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One Stop Search Centers
Modern museum management has moved into an interactive model emphasizing education and public engagement. In the past 15 years, collections management has been handled by using sophisticated Collection...
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Deep Cuts from Deep Gap: A Doc Watson Playlist
“Ralph… Rosa Lee has made up a list of Folkways records which I now have and I am enclosing it with this letter.” —Doc Watson to Ralph Rinzler, June 1963.Ralph Rinzler Papers and Audio Recordings,...
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Where have All the Scrolls Gone?
Have you been spending time lately thinking of just the right words to put in that 144 character tweet? Have you wondered is this photograph good enough before posting to Instagram? Have you been...
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Waxing poetic: Digitizing cylinder recordings
The National Anthropological Archives has been hard at work over the past two years digitizing our entire collection of sound recordings as part of a push to provide access to endangered language and...
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DPLA and the Smithsonian Participation
DPLA Fest 2016 is happening this week. We are so excited to see the tremendous success of this great national project! Attending this event in Washington DC hosted by the National Archives, the Library...
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Diamond in the Rough
Places of business go through a lot of changes. Archives are no different. Seasons and interns come and go. You have some volunteers for a year or two and others are around forever, becoming part of...
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Anthropologists in the Parks
National Park Week is this week! From April 16th to the 24th, you can visit all national parks for free. National parks and anthropology have always had an important relationship, and here at the...
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The Blue Note Photographs of Francis Wolff
For two decades, Francis Wolff photographed every jazz session that Blue Note Records made. He not only preserved a major part of jazz history, but with his remarkable eye, he captured amazing candid...
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The Dilemmas of Sharing Digital Assets in Large Scale
We live in a digital world where digital curation and digitization projects are taking place everywhere. For Archives collections, which often consist of multiple boxes and folders of materials, we are...
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The Tradescant Museum: A Proto-Smithsonian in London?
In one rare book in the Cullman Library in the National Museum of Natural History is a door to the lost world of two remarkable gardeners and the first museum in Great Britain open to the public.The...
View ArticleWhere Burpee Seeds Grow
As my time as an intern at the Archives of American Gardens comes to an end, I reflect on how I became intimately familiar with the W. Atlee Burpee & Company Collection. My project, digitizing...
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The Story of the "Labat: A Creole Legacy" Quilt
Chance meetings can result in amazing things. In 2000, Artist Lori K. Gordon and 102-year-old Celestine Labat met at a Hancock County Historical Society luncheon where Labat was the featured speaker....
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Ice Cream! Come and get your Ice Cream.
We have been having some interesting weather of late here in the D.C. region. D.C. can be a very hot and humid place in the summer, but that doesn’t stop tourists from visiting this city or from buying...
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The Little Lady with the Art Cart
In celebration of the 2016 Smithsonian Folklife Festival opening today on the National Mall, we are publishing this piece by summer 2015 intern Erin Enos. Erin recently graduated from UNC Chapel Hill...
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In the Pink with the Peony
The herbaceous peony dies back to the ground in the winter. The Smithsonian’s Material Culture Forum this past May had an intriguing and wide-ranging theme: “Home Grown Healing: Smithsonian Collections...
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SELGEM: The Data Structure
This is the first of a three-part-series on SELGEM, a pioneering computer system used to manage museum collections in the United StatesThe first publication about the Smithsonian’s SELGEM system,...
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SELGEM: The Logical Structure
This is the second of a three-part-series on SELGEM, a pioneering computer system used to manage museum collections in the United States. Read the first post here. A SELGEM (an acronym for: SELf...
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SELGEM: Designing IT applications in the 1970s
This is the last of a three-part-series on SELGEM, a pioneering computer systems used to manage museum collections in the United States. Read the first part here; and the second part here. You might...
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