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Category: Holidays and Special Occasions

MayDay – What’s in our disaster kit?

Each year archives, libraries, museums, and arts and historic preservation organizations set aside May 1 to participate in MayDay, an initiative created by Heritage Preservation to protect cultural heritage from disasters. Organizations are encouraged to do one thing for emergency preparedness. This year, the Libraries would like to share with you the content of our Emergency Response Kits.

Three cheers for our volunteers!

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!

Women in Research

Mary Agnes Chase, ca. 1960 from Flickr
Mary Agnes Chase, ca. 1960 from Flickr

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.

Women’s History Month: An American in Paris, Thérèse Bonney

Thérèse Bonney. Paris, France, 1925-30. Scissor shop sign, denoting the business of a seamstress or tailor.
Thérèse Bonney. Paris, France, 1925-30. Scissor shop sign, denoting the business of a seamstress or tailor.

Born in upstate New York, Thérèse Bonney(1897-1978), was a photojournalist whose work reflected a wide variety of interests and subjects. She studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Radcliffe College in the 1910s. Bonney immigrated to France in 1919 where she became one of the first ten women to graduate from the Sorbonne and founded the first American illustrated press service in Europe, the Bonney Service, in 1924.