We are thrilled to participate in this year’s Smithsonian Teachers’ Night! The event, which will mark its 20th Anniversary, will be held this Friday, September 28th, from 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm in the Kogod Courtyard of the Reynolds Center (Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery).
This post was written by Cathy Rae Smith, who had a 2011-2012 Graduate Research Assistantship at the National Museum of American History Library, and Alexia MacClain, a SIL staff member at the National Museum of American History Library.
“Encumber yourself with as little baggage as possible.” Though this holds true today, it was offered as advice to the traveler joining one of Althouse’s Select Foreign Tours in 1908. Let’s revisit an era of leisurely steamship travel in which the motto boasted, “Even the very best is none too good for our guests.”
Old typewriters are pretty cool, but did you ever try adding footnotes to a paper using one? Not so easily done. Thank goodness for modern innovations!
In my last Library Hacks post, I introduced Zotero and Mendeley, two free “reference managers” that help you collect and store all kinds of materials – from PDF files to book citations to webpages – in your own online library. Now we’ll look at how these same tools can help you add footnotes, citations and bibliographies to a paper as you’re writing it. And it’s a snap!
On October 18, internationally acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry and the Smithsonian Libraries will join forces to present a writers’ workshop, Lessons from a Bestseller, to teach general writing skills while benefitting the Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation Programs at the Smithsonian Libraries.
–This post was contributed by Allison Brice, American Art and Portrait Gallery Library intern.
I often joke with those who ask me about my academic studies that I am getting a degree in ‘old stuff’. With a major in history and two minors in art history and medieval studies, I must admit that I find anything from the last half-century rather boring. So when my supervisor at the American Art and Portrait Gallery Library told me to go down into the rare books section and find some ‘old stuff’ to put up for our Adopt-a-Book project…well, I was in heaven.
Over the last century, photography has evolved as much as, if not more than, any technology in wide-spread use. From the first experiments with light and the various chemical compounds used in creating daguerreotypes to Instagram and jpegs, photography has had more costume changes than Madonna. One of my favorite sub-collections in the Smithsonian History Art and Culture (SHAC) digital collection, housed at the Internet Archive, traces the early development, theory, and practice of fine art photography.
This post was written by Colette Leung, a 2012 summer intern at the Smithsonian National American History Library (NMAH Library).
Hello! My name is Colette, and this summer 2012, I had the opportunity to work as one of the National Museum of American History Library’s summer interns. I am currently working towards my Master’s in Library and Information Science, as well as a second Master of Arts in Humanities Computing, both at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. I have a lot of interest in observing how digital technology and print books are shaping libraries, and although I have been lucky enough to work on many different digital projects, I was very excited to start working on working on this internship that is offered through the Alberta-Smithsonian Internship Program.