It is with great sadness that I tell you of the death of Russell Train, one of the Libraries’ major benefactors. Russell was a close friend of Joseph F. Cullman 3rd and it was Joe’s suggestion that brought Russell to us and ultimately resulted in his donation of the Russell E. Train Africana Collection, which resides in the Cullman Library. The donation was singular since it came with a full inventory of the collection, which he developed, including evaluations of individual items.
This post was written by Cathy Rae Smith, who had a 2011-2012 Graduate Research Assistantship at the National Museum of American History Library, and Alexia MacClain, a SIL staff member at the National Museum of American History Library.
“Encumber yourself with as little baggage as possible.” Though this holds true today, it was offered as advice to the traveler joining one of Althouse’s Select Foreign Tours in 1908. Let’s revisit an era of leisurely steamship travel in which the motto boasted, “Even the very best is none too good for our guests.”
Old typewriters are pretty cool, but did you ever try adding footnotes to a paper using one? Not so easily done. Thank goodness for modern innovations!
In my last Library Hacks post, I introduced Zotero and Mendeley, two free “reference managers” that help you collect and store all kinds of materials – from PDF files to book citations to webpages – in your own online library. Now we’ll look at how these same tools can help you add footnotes, citations and bibliographies to a paper as you’re writing it. And it’s a snap!
On October 18, internationally acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry and the Smithsonian Libraries will join forces to present a writers’ workshop, Lessons from a Bestseller, to teach general writing skills while benefitting the Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation Programs at the Smithsonian Libraries.
–This post was contributed by Allison Brice, American Art and Portrait Gallery Library intern.
I often joke with those who ask me about my academic studies that I am getting a degree in ‘old stuff’. With a major in history and two minors in art history and medieval studies, I must admit that I find anything from the last half-century rather boring. So when my supervisor at the American Art and Portrait Gallery Library told me to go down into the rare books section and find some ‘old stuff’ to put up for our Adopt-a-Book project…well, I was in heaven.
This post was written by Alyssa Penick, Intern at The Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.
The Dibner Library for the History of Science and Technology recently acquired a nineteenth-century navigation atlas, The Marine Atlas, or a Seaman’s Complete Pilot for all the Principal Places in the Known World, which was published in London in 1826 by John William Norie. Currently under restoration, this large folio contains forty copperplate engravings of marine charts and depicts every ocean, sea, and coastline then known. The Dibner’s copy of The Marine Atlas is the seventh edition of the atlas and was bound in New York by Henry Spear in 1856. No other copies of Norie’s Marine Atlas are held by public collections, making this addition to the library particularly exciting.
Over the last century, photography has evolved as much as, if not more than, any technology in wide-spread use. From the first experiments with light and the various chemical compounds used in creating daguerreotypes to Instagram and jpegs, photography has had more costume changes than Madonna. One of my favorite sub-collections in the Smithsonian History Art and Culture (SHAC) digital collection, housed at the Internet Archive, traces the early development, theory, and practice of fine art photography.