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Month: May 2013

Political messages in Artists’ books

Erin Rushing
May 16, 2013
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Sue Coe 1
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.

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Smithsonian Libraries Unveils “Whales: From Bone to Book”

Liz O'Brien
May 15, 2013
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Fossils from "Ostéographie des cétacés vivants et fossiles"
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.

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Historical Sioux Tribal Newspapers See the Light of Day

Erin Rushing
May 10, 2013
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"Anpao" newspaper being digitized.
“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.

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African Art in the Cultural Heritage Library

Erin Thomas
May 6, 2013
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lecongoillustr11892brux_0137The 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.

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Funding for Open Access Publishing

Alvin Hutchinson
May 3, 2013
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Open Access Symbol
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.

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