Morgan E. Aronson and Julia Blakely co-authored this piece. James M. Goode, former Keeper of the Smithsonian Institution Building (affectionately known as “The Castle”) received this year the Individual more »
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives / Unbound
It’s September and students across the country are now well-settled in their new classrooms, many filled with laptops and high tech, interactive white boards. What would you expect to find in an 1874 schoolroom? This trade catalog from that year shows typical furniture but also illustrates a few more things, like teaching aids. Though a little lower tech than today’s models, some are still quite innovative.
Amid the manuscripts, incunabula and early modern texts at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology are two bright blue binders that don’t seem to quite fit, in every sense of the word. Too big for the shelf and too 20th century for the Dibner, don’t judge these books by their covers! In honor of National Comic Book Day we would like to highlight two of the Dibner’s most popular holdings—William Moulton Marston’s letters and scripts for the original Wonder Woman comic book series.
To celebrate Hispanic American Heritage Month, the Smithsonian Libraries is honoring Puerto Rican American natural history illustrator Louis Agassiz Fuertes with a blog post in both English and Spanish. The Spanish translation (bottom of page) is courtesy of Angel Aguirre, library technician at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) Library in Panama City, Republic of Panama.
This post was written by Deja Bond, the Kathryn Turner Diversity and Technology Intern in the Smithsonian Libraries’ Web Services Department. Deja is an undergraduate Computer Science student at Spelman College. Her work this summer consisted of developing techniques to create data for enhancing the Libraries’ forthcoming Image Gallery re-launch later this year.
My project was to design and code an algorithm to identify the predominant colors within an image. When someone performs a search in the Image Gallery (an online collection of images from Smithsonian Libraries books, still in beta), they are able to refine their search by subject, creator and publication date. The goal was to add another option for color. The big question was: how would I design and implement an algorithm that would return the predominant colors within an image for over 14,000 images sufficiently?
In addition to his art collection, Charles Lang Freer gave a substantial number of books from his personal library to the Smithsonian Institution. These books are wide ranging in subject matter including not only Asian and American Art but also mythology, anthropology, auction catalogs, and travel guides. The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library staff has been working to find them in its collection and identify Mr. Freer’s books in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS).
This post was written by James Truitt, intern in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History.
In August, the National Museum of Natural History opened Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend, an exhibition about the tusked whale monodon monoceros sometimes called the unicorn of the sea. Most of the exhibit focuses on narwhal biology, arctic ecology, and Inuit culture, but one section breaks from the polar theme to explore another legacy of the narwhal—the mythical unicorn.