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Smithsonian Libraries and Archives / Unbound

Finding treasures for digitization in the Research Annex

The post was written by Mark Coulbourne, Towson University student and fall intern in the Smithsonian Libraries Research Annex.

For the Fall Semester I was an intern at the Smithsonian Libraries Research Annex (SLRA), and was tasked with evaluating 19th and early 20th century monographs for digitization. My work with librarian Daria Wingreen-Mason centered on the areas of photography, exploration, Alaska, and zoology.

The ABC’s of the Corcoran Artist Files: the D’s

 

 

In the series called “The ABCs of the Corcoran Artist Files” the American Art and Portrait Gallery (AA/PG) Library will explore artists through the materials from the recent Corcoran Vertical File Collection donation by featuring artists whose surnames begin with that letter. This time we are looking at the artists whose last names that start with D.

Moving Pictures: Renaissance Painter-Engineers

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Noa Turel in the Dibner Library vault.

This post was written by Noa Turel, Ph.D./Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Art History, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dibner Library Fellow, January-March 2016. Applications are currently open for 2017 fellowship opportunities.

My three-month winter residency at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology was tremendously helpful in shaping and grounding my book project Ingenious Secrets: Painting and Research in Fifteenth-Century Courts. Coming in, I had three bibliographies of Dibner Library special collections materials through which I sought to advance my understanding of the phenomenon at the heart of this book, the curious employment of painters as engineers in Renaissance courts. The rare books, manuscripts, and visual materials I found in the course of my residency far exceeded my original estimation in the proposal. I wound up consulting many more items as well as secondary sources, finding over 130 to be helpful for my research.

Celebrating the research of Dr. Nancy Knowlton

Courtesy of Department of Invertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History.

The Smithsonian Libraries salutes Dr. Nancy Knowlton, the Sant Chair in Marine Science at the National Museum of Natural History and senior scientist emerita at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who has received the 2016 Secretary’s Distinguished Scholar Award. The award celebrates excellence in all branches of Smithsonian scholarship by honoring the sustained achievement of one outstanding Smithsonian scholar each year.