We field a lot of questions in the Book Conservation Lab about caring for personal collections. In the spirit of Preservation Week here are some answers to some of our Frequently Asked Questions. If you have additional questions we have a live “Ask Our Book Conservator Anything” April 30th from 12-2 PM!
Month: April 2014
April is Volunteer Appreciation Month and boy, do we ever appreciate our wonderful volunteers! The dozens of volunteers placed with us at the Smithsonian Libraries truly help us run. They include students, professionals, retirees and even former Libraries staff members. Here are a few special volunteers who help make our organization great. A heart-felt “thank you” to each and every one, as well as all of the other amazing folks behind the scenes!
At a recent Open Access Futures presentation, speaker Rick Anderson noted that the music industry has moved from selling CDs to selling individual songs and he wondered whether academic journals might do the same. In other words, what if libraries one day stopped subscribing to scholarly journals but instead bought individual articles one at a time, in response to immediate needs by researchers?
The Cooper-Hewitt Library has a large collection of over 2,000 World’s fair catalogues and books. Many are the official guidebooks that visitors could purchase with descriptions of pavilions and that helped locate sights and other points of interest. As a teenager, my mother had loved the 1939 World’s fair, so that when it came to New York City again in 1964-65, she wanted to see another World’s fair and have us children experience the same excitement and wonder.
If you find yourself repeating the same task over and over again while online, then you might benefit from some of these helpful tools! Whether you’d like to automate something between different web services or speed up your routine web duties, there is bound to be something here that could help! Below are three different kinds of services out there to help speed up and automate tasks performed routinely on the web.
Our Instagram followers (we’re @SILibraries) may have noticed some extra ornithological action in our feed recently. “Martha”, an origami passenger pigeon, has been in the spotlight the last few Mondays.
Many of us who wear glasses everyday will probably find ourselves relating to these two sentences.
“But take the subject all in all, and consider it in all its phases, it cannot be denied that the invention of spectacles was one of the most useful to the human family.”
“Many a man and woman to-day in all quarters of the known world owes the pleasure of existence to the use of scientifically constructed spectacles.”