It is with great sadness that we tell you of the sudden death of Sharon Layne, Library Technician in our Preservation Services Department, on December 18, 2014. Sharon was a faithful, dedicated employee of the Smithsonian for 26 years.
Author: Liz O'Brien
This post is submitted by Lilla Vekerdy, Head, Special Collections.
The Dibner Library of the History of the Science and Technology has acquired a nineteenth-century manuscript with artistically and scientifically outstanding watercolor illustrations.
A proud native of Washington, D.C., Salima Appiah-Duffell calls her new art library roving position the beginning of her “second career.” She splits her time between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library. Prior to coming to the Smithsonian, Salima served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and worked as a program analyst at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
This post was submitted by Susan Frampton, program coordinator, Smithsonian Libraries.
Serendipity: happy chance; lucky chance; happenstance; and good fortune.
Any and all of those words could be used to describe my encounter, collaboration and friendship with Andy Stern, executive director, and Todd McGrain, artist, sculptor and creative director, of The Lost Bird Project. My good luck began during an online image search for the Smithsonian Libraries’ exhibition Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America in September 2013; little did I know then that the exhibition would take on a very big dimension.
The Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Gardens present The Lost Bird Project, an exhibition by artist Todd McGrain, open through May 2015. This project recognizes the tragedy of modern extinction by immortalizing North American birds that have been driven to extinction. It features large-scale bronze sculptures of the Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck, the great auk, the heath hen, and the passenger pigeon. Four of the sculptures are located in the Enid A. Haupt Garden, a 4.2-acre public rooftop garden between the Smithsonian Castle and Independence Avenue. The fifth sculpture, the passenger pigeon, is in the Urban Habitat Garden at the National Museum of Natural History. This post is written by Todd McGrain, Author, Sculptor, and Creative Director of The Lost Bird Project. Hear Todd speak at our free event on November 20th!
Endowments allow the Libraries to invest in print collections to preserve our collective past. So much of what the Libraries offers cannot be found elsewhere and named endowments ensure a steady and growing stream of income to acquire and preserve treasures. This post is written by Ruth Osterweis Selig, Research Collaborator, National Museum of Natural History.
Originally from Nebraska, Lesley Parilla is our new cataloger for the Field Book Project. Her first position at the Smithsonian was as a volunteer at the National Museum of Natural History, where she met the staff establishing the Field Book Project. Lesley soon became the first contractor hired for the Project and helped develop its initial cataloging procedures and workflow. The Project then migrated to the Smithsonian Institution Archives, until the summer of 2014 when it officially became part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Biodiversity Heritage Library.