When I was in library school, one concept I remember being covered was the subject-based query versus the known-item query. These were used to represent two basic but very different types of library usage and required of librarians different search and related skills.
This year is Smithsonian Libraries is celebrating 50 years as a unified system. While each museum has (at least) one library dedicated research material on items related to the museum’s collection; as a branch system, The Libraries’ help researchers explore any part of a question that interests them. This sounds pretty straightforward, but what does it look like in real life? To find out, this post explore how one item from a museum’s collection can be researched across several of our library branches. Our example: Bill T. Jones (1985), a portrait of the choreographer by Robert Mapplethorpe. This work is on view in the Recent Acquisitions exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
If you think of Jean Dubuffet, Yves Tanguy, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, Marc Chagall, and Joan Miró, you may instantly think of some of the most famous canvases and sculptures of modern art. These artists have been immortalized in art history as key figures within Modernism, a position made even more apparent by their countless works housed in some of the most important museums around the world. A name less recognizable is that of Pierre Matisse, the art dealer and gallerist who represented each of the artists mentioned above at various moments throughout his 50-plus year career.
This post was written by Kendra Hurt, an Instructional Design Intern at the Biodiversity Heritage Library & Smithsonian Libraries. Kendra is graduating this May from the University of Maryland with a Master of Library Science.
This semester I have worked with Bianca Crowley and Trina Brown as an Instructional Design intern, and I’ve been creating videos, writing instructions, and conducting sessions on using Prezi and how to search the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) via advanced search.
Not to brag, but we’ve got a pretty cool new research tool to show off: OneSearch.
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.
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.
