Warmest thoughts and best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a very happy New Year from the heart of the Smithsonian! We hope the video below expresses the great regard we hold for each of you, the people we serve.
Author: Richard Naples
Richard works in the Digital Services Division of the Smithsonian Libraries and helps to manage data for Research Online, the bibliography and repository for scholarly output at the Smithsonian Institution.
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.
As part of my duties in wrangling data for Smithsonian Research Online, I worked on a project to collect and ingest the historic legacy of published scholarship produced by Smithsonian researchers since the Institution’s inception in 1846. The main focus of my participation is cleaning and preparing the data, but I find it hard to resist not paying attention to its historic significance. I’ll admit occasionally getting lost thinking about what it was like to be on the front lines of natural history research, identifying and describing new species.
It might be a sign of a twisted mind, but I can’t help imagining illustrations and pictures from old books coming to life. Lucky for me, we live in a time when tools for making my twisted dreams come true are readily available. Below, I’m going to go through the basic steps I take in order to turn images collected from our digitized books into the animated GIFs the Smithsonian Libraries posts to its Tumblr blog.
Insecta. Lepidoptera-Rhopalocera , 1879-1901
If you’ve spent any time deep in the heart of libraryland, then you surely have encountered ephemera, marginalia, stunningly beautiful bookplates, funny advertisements, and other semi-random stuff in the stacks that yearned to be shared, so we’re doing just that through the microblogging platform Tumblr.
What if you could search the research output of hundreds of institutions in one place, gaining access to some of the most important research being done on any number of fields of interest?
It is no secret that today’s job market is a dog-eat-dog world. With unemployment rates at record highs, the future that many college graduates see on the horizon is a grim and scary place. However, University of California, Berkeley has created a program to help better prepare their students for the post-graduate battlefield. The Externship Program creates opportunities for students to get hands-on experience in a chosen career field during their winter break. The program is made possible by UC Berkeley alumni who generously share their time with undergraduates who are ready to explore a career. Depending on the sponsors availability, the externships can range from one day to one month. Although many other notable universities such as Cornell, USC, Boston College, and University of Pennsylvania have similar externship programs, it is still a relatively unknown opportunity. Below, Haley and Kaylie share their experience working at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.