On April 30th, in celebration of Preservation Week , the Smithsonian Libraries will host a question and answer session with our book conservator, Katie Wagner. Do you have a question about how to care for your own books or how we care for ours at the Smithsonian? Now is your chance to ask our expert!
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.
If you’ve spent any time deep in the heart of libraryland, then you surely have encountered ephemera, marginalia, stunningly beautiful bookplates, funny advertisements, and other semi-random stuff in the stacks that yearned to be shared, so we’re doing just that through the microblogging platform Tumblr.