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Category: Research

A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down

This is the second post in a two-part series. Catch up on the first part hereAllegra Tennis interned with the Field Book Project and Metadata Services over the summer to investigate Smithsonian research related to countries with populations of under a million.

I came to the field of librarianship from a scientific background.  The processes, details, and discoveries to be made have always held a magical quality for me.  As I grew up and talked with others, I began to notice that not everyone views science in this way.  Many people seem to be interested in science, whether in the idea of it, the usefulness of it, or they raw beauty of it.  Yet too often people are intimidated by science, either by the research or by the researchers themselves.

Mughal art for the masses

Mughal art
Detail of Shah Jahan enthroned with Mahabat Khan and a Shaykh, from the late Shah Jahan Album S1986.406. Courtesy of Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

This post was written by Keala Richard, intern in the Freer|Sackler Library during the summer of 2016. Keala is currently working towards a Masters in Library and Information Science at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

When I was a teenager, I spent countless afternoons gossiping and scheming with my best friend under the watchful eye of Mughal royalty. Her family’s collection of miniatures, stripped of their gilt borders and in many cases missing in-painting, still struck me as the most beautiful pieces in her parents’ massive collection of Indian art. Whenever I would sneak down the hall for midnight slumber party refrigerator raids, I would always stop and admire the princes and princesses painted in profile. When I first learned that I was awarded the Smithsonian Minority Awards Program Internship, I marveled at the serendipity of being selected for the Freer|Sackler Library’s Mughal Wikipedia Project. I would get to learn more about the gilded nobility on my best friend’s wall.

Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educators Awards

Researcher with magnifying glass. The Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educators Awards allow mid-career educators to be in residence and utilize the Smithsonian Libraries distinctive collections, focusing on science, history, culture and arts.  The awards are open to middle & high school teachers, college teachers, and museum educators working on curriculum development or publications in print or electronic form. The Library offers excellent resources for developing curricula relating to Common Core, Core Arts Standards, and Advanced Placement curricula.

Celebrate the Potato

September is National Potato Month. Almost all the potatoes grown in the United States are planted in the spring and gathered in the fall. It is the time of year that schools in northern Maine have “harvest break” when students work to dig and sort the season’s spud crop soon after summer vacation.

Maine’s custom is one small part of the very long and interwoven agricultural, economic, social, culinary, medical, and ritual histories of this humble staple. It is a story that stretches from ancient gardens in the Andean Mountains 10,000 to 8,000 years ago … to perhaps Mars in the future? In the recent movie, The Martian, the stranded astronaut-botanist (played by Matt Damon), bases his long-term survival strategy on the Red Planet, not completely unfeasibly, on planting potatoes. But is the potato relevant for us today?

Explore Emil Schimpf’s airships on National Aviation Day

VorlaYufligeins00Schi_0001
Cover of Vorläuflige instruction über zusammensetzung gebrauch des Luftschifferpark.

Today, August 19th, marks National Aviation Day and we’re celebrating with a lesser-known flying vehicle — the airship. Emil Schimpf’s ballooning manuscript Vorläufige Instruction über Zusammensetzung Gebrauch des Luftschifferparks was recently added to the Smithsonian Transcription Center and is available for crowd-sourced transcription.

Small Stories from Small Countries

This post was written by Conal Huetter, recent MLS graduate from the University of Maryland and Smithsonian Libraries summer intern.

Hay internship

My internship was made possible by the bequest of the H.R. and E.J. Hay Charitable Trust, which was designed to support the research needs of countries with a population under one million people. With my fellow intern, Allegra Tennis (MLIS student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), this has involved identifying geographic locations that meet this qualification, and looking at past and current Smithsonian research that has taken place in these countries. Our biggest area of focus