Please join us for:
“Whale Research at the Smithsonian
Past, Present and Future”
Thursday June 6, 2013, 10:30 am – 5:00 pm

A symposium associated with the exhibition Whales: Bone to Book*
National Museum of Natural History, Baird Auditorium
This event is FREE and OPEN to the public!

The Smithsonian has studied whales since the 1850s, building collections that are unmatched in the world, and yielding insights into these enigmatic species. Listen to four distinguished speakers describe the origins of this legacy, its scientific value and its future.

Program

10:00 AM                    Museum doors open; registration begins

10:30 AM                    Welcome – Dr. Nicholas D. Pyenson, Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals

10:45 – 11:45AM      Prof. R. Ewan Fordyce, University of Otago, New Zealand

“Unraveling the history of whales and dolphins – the most unlikely mammals”

11:45 – 1:15 PM         Lunch on your own

1:30 –   2:30 PM         Prof. D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

“To be honest, soft anatomy never struck a responsive chord in my makeup: Remington Kellogg among the Whales”

2:30 –   3:00 PM          Dr. Stephen Godfrey, Calvert Marine Museum, Solomons, M

“Fossils from Calvert Cliffs: over 100 years of paleontological discovery”                            

3:00 –   3:30 PM          Break

3:30 –   4:00 PM          Dr. Nicholas Pyenson (with demos by Ms. Holly Little)
“Cetaceans in silico: 3D digitizing fossil whales in the field and in the museum”

4:00 –   5:00 PM          Q&A with speakers (moderated by Pyenson) + wrap-up

For more information, see the event’s website: http://library.si.edu/events/whales-symposium

*The Whales: Bone to Book exhibition will be open to the public starting May 25, 2013. The exhibition will be located in the Evans Gallery of the National Museum of Natural History.

“History is more than what’s in museums. It’s what’s lying on the side table in your den, or in a box in your attic — displayed in a frame on your nightstand, or stored in the basement.  We are all custodians of history, and preserving these personal treasures, protecting them against loss and destruction is vitally important,” said Berry.

Preservation Matters! featured presentations and discussions on disaster response, pest management, and archives preservation by librarians, conservators and preservation specialists from federal and local organizations. Participating organizations include the Smithsonian Libraries, Library of Congress, Folger Shakespeare Library, Defense Acquisitions University, National Archives and Records Administration, Smithsonian Institution Archives, National Portrait Gallery and the American Institute for Conservation. You’ll learn how best to safeguard your family’s history so that it can be passed on to the next generation.

Preservation Week is a collaborative effort supported by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association, Library of Congress and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Cover of Sue Coe’s “X”.

This post was contributed by Anna Brooke, librarian at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library.

One of the Hirshhorn Museum Library’s artists’ books with a political message is X by Sue Coe.  Coe is a British artist-journalist born Tamworth (Staffordshire), England in 1951. She attended the Royal College of Art, London. In 1972 she moved to New York City where she lives and works. Art and politics will be the theme for the Art Libraries Society (Arlis) conference which will be held in Washington, D. C. in the spring of 2014.This artists’ book is dedicated to “X,” the last name of the African American leader Malcolm X. It was published in 1986 by a small press in New York City, Raw Books & Graphics. The title page reads: “Pictures by Sue Coe, Text by Sue Coe (with Art Spiegelman), “Concurrent events” by Judith Moore, Edited by Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, Design by Francoise Mouly.” The book has only 32 pages of pictures, including a timeline of events from 1955 to 1965 by the journalist, Judith Moore. Short political poems by Coe and Spiegelman are printed over Coe’s pictures which were selected by Francoise Mouly from Coe’s recent work at the time.  This small, inexpensive graphic comic book is a collaboration of four people working as a DIY team.

“Malcolm X and the Slaughterhouse” Sue Coe, 1985. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

According to the book’s editor and designer, Francoise Mouly, Sue Coe was reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X when she was inspired to make her Malcolm X series of prints. The seeds of this project lie in an earlier book by Sue Coe, also in our collection, How To Commit Suicide in South Africa, 1983.

The Raw Press was founded by Mouly and her husband, the cartoonist, Art Spiegelman. The most famous publication of Raw was Maus, a Pulizer- prize winning comic book for adults on the Holocaust. Incidentally, Francoise appeared on a panel, Comics as Children’s Literature, during  Small Press Expo 2012 in Rockville, Maryland.

Brochure for Directions exhibit featuring Sue Coe. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The Hirshhorn Museum library collects artists’ books to support research on our museum’s collection, our exhibitions, and our programs. X fits into all three elements of our collection policy. The museum owns one mixed media work on paper by Sue Coe, Malcom X and the Slaughterhouse, June 1985. This work is illustrated in X on the dedication page.  Twelve of Sue Coe’s collages and works on paper were shown at the Hirshhorn in 1994 in a Directions exhibition (see brochure). Frank Gettings was the exhibition curator and Anna Brooke wrote the biography and bibliography for the brochure. A public lecture by the artist was held in the Hirshhorn Museum auditorium.

“Circe,” George Grosz, 1927. Museum of Modern Art.

X is a social critique, raw, dark, and disturbing. Through mass distribution of her illustrations in magazines and newspapers and her art works, Coe supports the victims of oppression and calls for social change. She spent ten years investigating the meat industry and produced 160 mixed media drawings on the subject and a book, Dead Meat. Her art is related to the German Social Realist artists of the early 20th century, George Grosz (see Grosz pig) and Otto Dix, and also to Goya’s Disasters of War in the 19th century. Capitalist pigs are featured on the cover of X and in Coe’s work Porkopolus.  X is also related to muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair whose novel, The Jungle, 1906, exposed shocking conditions in a meat packing factory.

X is a noteworthy example of the artist as political activist in our artists’ book collection.

Fossils from “Ostéographie des cétacés vivants et fossiles”

The Smithsonian Libraries opens its new exhibition “Whales: From Bone to Book” in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History May 25. This exhibition is a collaboration between the Libraries and the museum’s Department of Paleobiology. “Bone to Book” will be on display through April 2014.

Studying natural history is about discovering objects in the natural world and translating their meaning into scientific knowledge. “Whales: From Bone to Book” traces the journey of how Smithsonian scientists study the largest and most intelligent mammals on the planet: whales. The exhibition describes how the bones and fossils of these animals make their way from discovery on a beach or in rock strata, to the museum’s doors and into its vast collections, and finally to sharing new knowledge about the natural history of whales, past, present and future.

Sketch of a Basilosaurus skeleton.

Whales are among the unlikeliest of mammals: Their ancestors lived on land, but they spend 99 percent of their lives underwater. Scientists still have much to learn about their natural history, even as humans have hunted many whale species to the brink of extinction.

The Smithsonian has been studying whales since the 1850s, and its collections of modern and fossil whale specimens in the National Museum of Natural History are unmatched in the world. Teams of Smithsonian scientists, researchers and illustrators continue this legacy of investigation, collecting whale bones, placing them in the museum for study and publishing their findings.

The Smithsonian Libraries is part of this process, housing the world’s best collection of resources about marine mammals – from centuries-old books to electronic journals that publish the latest discoveries by Smithsonian researchers.

This exhibition showcases Magnus Olaus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Antwerp: 1557), Johan Jonston’s Historiae naturalis v. 3: De piscibus et cetis (Frankfurt: 1650-1653), Conrad Gessner’s Nomenclator aquatilibus animantium (Zurich: 1560) and Pierre-Joseph van Beneden and Paul Gervais’s Ostéographie des cétacés (Paris: 1868-1880). Also highlighted are the graphics of Smithsonian scientific illustrators past and present, including Elaine R.S. Hodges, Sydney Prentice and Mary Parrish, and objects such as an illustrator’s tools, a printer’s block of an ear bone illustration, hip and thigh bones of the fossil whale Basilosaurus cetoides, the original specimen of the recently discovered Bohaskaia monodontoides and the Smithsonian Digitization Program 3D Lab’s documentation of a fossil whale site found in the Atacama Desert of Chile in 2011.

From “
Historiae de gentibus septentrionalibus”

Accompanying this exhibition is a symposium, “Whale Research at the Smithsonian: Past, Present and Future,” in the National Museum of Natural History June 6. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, visit http://library.si.edu/events/whales-symposium.

 I peeled up many layers of flooring, but left the decorative walls with their embossed designs, which I always thought were plasterwork. I have since become nostalgic about the linoleum, and found out that my walls were actually covered with a type of wallpaper!

L: Art objects in Lincrusta-Walton. [Sunbury-on-Thames? : s.n., ca. 1880] NK3505.A784. CHMRB. R: Murdison, Co.,Chicago. “Anaglypta”. Murdison Co.: Chicago : The Company, [1927?] fNB1280 .M8 1927Z. CHMRB

In the second half of the nineteenth century, new industrial techniques produced a variety of innovative furnishing materials and decorative effects that formerly had been available only to the wealthy. A good example of this is linoleum for floors and Lincrusta, an embossed covering for walls. Both were invented by an Englishman named Frederick Walton. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Library has trade literature from manufacturers of both of these products, Art objects in Lincrusta-Walton, from 1880, Anaglypta, 1927, and The Armstrong pattern book ,from 1939. These trade catalogs are important documents for studying the history of design, interiors, period patterns and furnishings.

The Armstrong pattern book. Lancaster, Penn. : Armstrong Cork Company. 1939. Cooper-Hewitt Library. TS1779.L5 A76 CHM.

Walton noticed one day that the top of a paint jar had a rubbery skin, which was  oxidized linseed oil, and began thinking of ways to use it. In 1860 after a series of experiments, he created what would become known as linoleum. It is made from oxidized linseed oil mixed with ground cork dust, gums, and pigments, which are pressed onto a canvas backing. Walton is also known for another invention in 1877; a resin-based wall covering called Lincrusta, which could imitate wood paneling, stamped leather, or decorative plaster in low relief. A similar but lighter and more flexible product, Anaglypta, was invented in 1887.

In 1872 Walton arrived in New York to establish the American Linoleum Manufacturing Company on Staten Island in a company town he named “Linoleumville.” The company that would eventually dominate all linoleum manufacturing was the Armstrong Cork and Tile Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Armstrong led the way with new advertising techniques in the late 1910s that were the first linoleum ads to be addressed directly to the consumer rather than the retailer. They appeared in magazines like the Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post and helped to increase the market demand. By 1918, Armstrong was advertising 380 designs. They and other companies created patterns that looked like other more expensive materials such as carpets and ceramic tiles. Linoleum was one of the most fashionable and widely used floor coverings from the 1870s to the 1960s. It has made a comeback because of its “retro” look and “green” potential. A form of Anaglypta is also popular again. Its high relief surface can cover up damaged and cracked walls, common in old apartment buildings today and can be purchased at many home improvement centers.

“Anpao Kin” newspaper, ready for scanning.

This post was contributed by Ann Juneau, Department Head, National Museum of Natural History Library.

A determined need to know more about their heritage and history is what drove the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Minnesota to want to digitize two newspapers of their ancestors in the Dakotas. First contacting the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University, The Community began their quest.  The communique for assistance then went on to a Smithsonian Institution emeritus anthropologist, and close colleague of the Institute’s director, and the kinetic energy was established.

Knowing that the Smithsonian Libraries had a more bountiful number of holdings for the two titles than other collections across the country, she approached us. Recognizing both the needs of the Sioux Community and the research community at large, the Library staff began pondering how to pursue the project. The first request of its kind for digitizing Native American newspapers, it took the staff a bit of sorting through potential twists and turns, but the relevance of the project’s importance was at the forefront.   These historical Sioux newspapers will now be much more accessible with far less need for the print copies housed in the Anthropology Library to be handled, except on rare occasions.

Published in North Dakota and South Dakota, respectively, The Herald of the Black Robe’s Church (Sina Sapa Wocekiye Taeyanpaha) and The Daybreak (Anpao) are being included in the Smithsonian Libraries’ Cultural Heritage Library.
Around one third of the Library’s holdings of 160+ issues of Sina Sapa are now in the Internet Archive. Because of serious conservation concerns, The Anpao issues, numbering almost 300 in the Libraries’ holdings, will be digitized later.

“Anpao Kin” newspaper, ready for scanning.

A lengthy course of events occurred prior to scanning the material. After library staff from three units collated the issues and reviewed conservation concerns, months elapsed. An experienced cataloger met the next set of challenges, carefully and masterfully teasing out additional newspaper titles embedded in the groupings of holdings. Examining each issue, he mentioned enjoying the correction and enhancement of the existing catalog records. Once the Libraries received a long-awaited large-format digital scanner, staff began digitizing the newspapers.

Anpao Kin newspaper

Beginning as a quest for two newspaper titles, the Libraries actually uncovered four titles:

1. Sina sapa wocekiye taeyanpaha (The Herald of the Black Robe’s Church), 1892-1939.  Saint Paul’s Catholic Indian Mission of the Yankton Tribe of the Sioux Indians). Fort Totten, North Dakota.   “The monthly supplement “Eyanpaha” was occasionally included.
2. Anpao.  Niobrara Mission Forest City, South Dakota, 1878 – 1887
3. Anpao Kin. Niobrara Mission, Forest City, South Dakota, 1894–1908
4. Anpao (The Daybreak). Protestant Episcopal Church, Mission, South Dakota volume, 1908 – 1937

“Sina sapa wocekiye taeyanpaha” newspaper

The earliest presses of tribal newspapers were started by missionaries. The papers and magazines were designed to demonstrate the religious activities of the missionaries, including teachings and educational practices they engaged in with the tribal villagers.  Researchers can find nuggets of biographical information about individual tribes’ people; invaluable leads to Native American ancestry, linguistics and tribal dialectical examples.

The Indian Advocate, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

These new digital titles will add to the small but growing number of historical Native American newspapers on the web. When searching, one can find some by name, but there are not many websites or portals for full text tribal newspapers. Fortunately, The Library of Congress’ project Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers has digitized, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a number of  tribal newspapers including those of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Cree, Creek, Mohawk, Navajo, Northwest Alaskan Inupiat, and Yupik, among many other states’ newspapers.

One of the first documented tribal papers was published by the Benedictine Fathers of Sacred Heart Mission in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, and called The Indian Advocate, text in English and Choctaw. It began in 1889 and ceased publication in 1910.

Please join us for:

“Unlocking Taxonomic Literature II using Linked Open Data”
a free lecture featuring Joel Richard
Thursday, May 16, 2013, 12:00pm-1:00pm
S. Dillon Ripley Center, Lecture Hall, Room 3027

Using Linked Open Data, the Smithsonian Libraries is bringing the Taxonomic Literature II guide to botanical publications on the web in a searchable, shareable form. After an overview of linked data, we will show how the Smithsonian Libraries is creating Taxonomic Literature II Online on its Drupal-based digital library website.

Speaker Joel Richard is the lead Web Developer for the Smithsonian Libraries and has over eighteen years of experience in software, web development and internet technology.

Before starting at the Libraries in 2009, Joel owned his own business doing website development and consulting for a variety of clients. When it comes to computers, Richard is a generalist with a broad and ever-growing understanding of computers and internet technology. However, he maintains an emphasis on web development, Drupal and Linked Open Data. Outside of work, he has many analog interests, including LEGO, cooking, travel, photography and philately.

This lecture will be webcast live at library.si.edu/webcasts/live. See our site for more details.

]]> http://blog.library.si.edu/2013/05/smithsonian-libraries-presents-joel-richard/feed/ 2 http://blog.library.si.edu/2013/05/african-art-in-the-cultural-heritage-library/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=african-art-in-the-cultural-heritage-library http://blog.library.si.edu/2013/05/african-art-in-the-cultural-heritage-library/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 13:00:32 +0000 Erin Thomas http://blog.library.si.edu/?p=8033 more »]]> The Cultural Heritage Library (CHL) has been through a few incarnations over the last 3 years but the content remains the same. It is a digital collection that includes materials from the History, Art, and Culture libraries within the Smithsonian. The collection has been developed using branch librarian’s selections as well as items that have been identified as being relatively scarce according to OCLC holdings. Subject headings are part of the descriptive metadata for each title and are available to browse from the Internet Archive website, providing an at-a-glance overview of the collection.

While the CHL is still in its infancy, there are several areas that stand out as distinct sub-collections, thanks to the curatorial efforts of the branch librarians. One such sub-collection is the Congolese Collection from the Warren M. Robbins Library, National Museum of African Art. Janet Stanley, the African Art Librarian, says:

We’ve been building this Congolese collection at the Warren M. Robbins Library for 33 years and are pleased to be able to share it with scholars and students globally, especially those living and working on the continent of Africa, where none of these books are likely to be found.  Of particular interest is the set entitled Congo illustré (1892), which contains historical photographs of Congolese society, Belgian colonial & missionary enterprises, and flora & fauna.

Currently at over 10,000 pages, the Congolese Collection continues to grow as fragile copies of the physical collection are repaired in advance of digitization.

Open Access

The open access (OA) movement has a lot of moving parts. For example it has led some research funding agencies to mandate that research publications resulting from grants should be made publicly available. A recent memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy requires federal science agencies to prepare a policy for making the published results of scientific research available to the public. The Smithsonian Institution is now working to formalize its policy.

In recent years, many Smithsonian scholars have embraced OA journals as a place to publish their work. The Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) database shows over 800 articles written by Smithsonian scholars which were issued in OA journals and which are therefore available to the public. However the Smithsonian Digital Repository (part of the SRO program) has archived only 250 of those papers. We will now begin to think about how to capture the 500+ or so which we lack.

But while distributing and reproducing text is nearly free thanks to the Internet, that doesn’t mean that publishing is without cost. Converting a manuscript into a research publication requires professional editorial staff to manage a wide range of activities that are transparent to the reader.

research.si.edu

Consequently an alternative scenario to traditional subscription-based publishing has emerged in recent years. Widely known as the “Author Pays Model” of funding, the journal publisher receives an article processing charge (APC) to manage the manuscript submission, review, typesetting, design, etc. This processing charge is intended to replace the publisher’s subscription revenue so that editorial expenses can be covered yet the paper can be made freely available to all readers.

The “customer” in this new business model is the author rather than the reader. The service being provided is the editorial review and management of articles to meet authors’ needs to publish their work. And although the client is the writer and not the reader, the phrase “Author Pays” may not be entirely accurate since it is often the scholar’s institution or research sponsoring organization that pays this fee. Many foundations which sponsor research are beginning to require awardees to publish the results of their research grant in an open access journal and to include the APC in the requested funding amount.

There have been some objections raised to this new model of publishing. Among them is the creation of a vanity press situation or the possibility of hyper-inflation among APCs, as was the case with journal subscriptions over the last few decades. Despite this, an increasing number of publishers have launched OA journals based on this model including the commercial publishers John Wiley, Springer and the prestigious Nature Publishing Group.

Some OA publishers are beginning to offer institutional memberships so that APCs are discounted for authors at a particular institution. While the author-pays model is becoming mainstream (the OA journal, PLOS One published over 23,000 papers in 2012) these  memberships are still somewhat new for institutions to manage. The cost-effectiveness of memberships should be weighed against the fact that payment of APCs can often be borne by one of a number of people. For example the foundation sponsoring the research may pay the APC or a co-author from a different institution may pay it.

The Smithsonian Research Online program is following these and related developments in hopes of advising Smithsonian scholars on issues related to publishing options and the revolution in the scholarly communications arena.

Rachel Frick and Martin Kalfatovic at DPLA launch event.

The Smithsonian Institution recently announced that it will join with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to provide links to a wealth of the Institution’s cultural and scientific content. The DPLA pilot project, which combines and centralizes links to the collections of participating cultural institutions, launched April 18.The Smithsonian will serve as a digital content hub within the DPLA network, which provides links to the Smithsonian’s digital collection of books, journals, museum objects, manuscripts and videos. Through the DPLA, the Smithsonian Libraries will collaborate with renowned libraries, universities, archives and museums to reach a wide national audience.

The DPLA is taking the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all. This impact-oriented research effort unites leaders from all types of libraries, museums and archives with educators, industry and government to define the vision for a digital library in service of the American public.

Notes of support from DPLA fans.

A formal launch of the DPLA was scheduled for April 18th in Boston. However, because of the tragic events in the area, the official celebrations were cancelled. In conjunction with Rachel Frick (Digital Library Federation), it was decided to hold an informal and impromptu “meet up” at the Smithsonian. Approximately 40-50 people attended the event; those attending came from a variety of institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Library of Congress, the Enoch Pratt Library (Baltimore), the Berkman Center (Harvard), and the National Park Service.

Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero.

David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, also showed his support by coming by and chatting with guests for about an hour. Earlier in the day, Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough, who was out of town during the gathering, sent a message wishing staff “Good luck with the event. You have my full support.”

Early in the event, a video call was launched to the DPLA Secretariat in Cambridge, MA. Dan Cohen (DPLA Executive Director), Emily Gore (Director of Content), Maura Marx (outgoing DPLA Program Director), Amy Rudensdorf (Assistant Director of Content), and others, sent greetings to those in Washington. Cohen noted that the Smithsonian and National Archives represented over 50% of the total records in DPLA at the time of launch.

Kalfatovic, Frick, radio host Kojo Nmamdi and DPLA director Dan Cohen.

On Tuesday, April 30th, Martin Kalfatovic, SIL’s Associate Director of Digital Services, joined Rachel Frick and Daniel Cohen on the Kojo Nmandi Show, a locally produced public radio program. The DPLA discussion, part of the regular Tech Tuesday programming, followed up on a 2011 DPLA segment. Listen to the segment now!

Text by Liz O’Brien and Martin Kalfatovic.