Natural and Physical Sciences

This week (April 4-10, 2021) is  National Library Week  and Tuesday is set aside to celebrate National Library Workers Day. It’s a wonderful opportunity to highlight the important contributions made by all library staff.  In honor of National Library Workers Day, we caught up with a few staff members to hear what they’ve been working on over the past year.

Ready to fall into another round of digital jigsaw puzzles? We’ve put together, or rather, taken apart five new puzzles based on images in our collections.

Did you know you can honor friends and family, enable important research, and skip the mall this holiday season? Adopting an item from the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is a unique way to celebrate your loved ones while providing essential funding to support our work. Whether your gift funds the preservation of volumes from hundreds of years ago, the purchase of new titles for our collection, or increased accessibility to items on our shelves, your adoption enables all that we do.

When the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building reopened in November 2021, it launched FUTURES, an ambitious, interactive exploration of what lies ahead for humanity. This building-wide exhibition is on view until July 7^th, 2022 and highlights artworks, technologies, and ideas that look towards the future. Included in the exhibition is “Women in America: Extra and Ordinary”, an innovative classroom tool developed by Sara Cardello, our Head of Education.

Argentine grass expert Dr. Cleofé E. Calderón (1929-2007) collected species, published descriptions of rare and unusual plants, and led workshops that helped shape the field of bamboo taxonomy. Affiliated with the Smithsonian for much of her agrostology career, Dr. Calderón’s legacy can be traced in collections across the Institution, including publications, field books, and photos in Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.

To celebrate National Library Week and a new spring season, we’ve put together another round of digital jigsaw puzzles. This time we’re featuring a variety of soothing natural history-related scenes.

It’s National Library Week 2020! This year’s theme is “Find your place at the library.” While the Smithsonian Libraries has closed its 21 physical branches during the COVID-19 outbreak, our work continues. We invite you to find a place with us online through our virtual resources, continued services, and digital content. We are here to help you explore and discover from the comfort of your home–and we look forward to welcoming you back in person as soon as we can.

Although our 21 physical branches remain closed during the COVID-19 outbreak, we’re still excited to celebrate National Library Week with our users near and far. While staff and researchers are certainly missing physical book collections, thousands of titles are available online thanks to the work of our Digital Library and Digitization Department.

As the world faces the global challenge of COVID-19, the Smithsonian Libraries is working to provide research services and resources to our users around the world.

Whether you’re headed back to school, back to work, or back to your home office or dining room table this fall, we’ve compiled a few fun treats and created this Digital Book Bag for you! Piece together digital jigsaw puzzles, download free coloring pages, or browse a few favorite books from our Di

Another season, another set of digital jigsaw puzzles! Ahead of National Puzzle Day (January 29th), we’ve put together one more round of images for you to piece together. They include a few snowy scenes as well as some warmer images to brighten your winter months.

The pineapple, indigenous to South America and domesticated and harvested there for centuries, was a late comer to Europe. The fruit followed in its cultivation behind the tomato, corn, potato, and other New World imports. Delicious but challenging and expensive to nurture in chilly climes and irresistible to artists and travelers for its curious structure, the pineapple came to represent many things. For Europeans, it was first a symbol of exoticism, power, and wealth, but it was also an emblem of colonialism, weighted with connections to plantation slavery.

A garden is a place to rest, relax, rejuvenate. It also provides an opportunity to learn about nature. Staff at Smithsonian Libraries and Archives are also learning and developing new skills. Some of these new skills are related to digitization and accessibility of biodiversity literature.

This post was originally featured on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog. 

The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Adopt-a-Book program has brought donors, Smithsonian staff, and treasured collection items together for twelve years. This year our annual event went virtual in a series of Adopt-a-Book Salons. Across four evenings, we were able to showcase 77 items from our collections. We featured selections from the Smithsonian Institution Archives for the first time, giving our attendees a look into our incredible archival materials.

This post was written by Katerina Ozment, part of the Smithsonian Libraries’ 50

 A chill rain drizzled over guests arriving at Bamie Roosevelt’s midtown brownstone near the corner of Madison Avenue and East 62nd Street in December 1887. There weren’t many of them, but all had two things in common: they were New York’s most influential and rich social elite, and they all loved hunting big game. All were hand-picked by the h

This post was written by Lezlie Hernandez, a Summer 2021 intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, sponsored by the American Women’s History Initiative. Her project focused on researching the history of Smithsonian women in science. 

The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives invites you to join us for our 2021 Dibner Library Lecture, featuring Steven Turner, “What Was James Smithson Doing in the Kitchen & Classroom?”

Wednesday, December 1st at 5 pm ET
Register Now

We’re looking forward to hosting Steven Turner, author of The Science of James Smithson, for our Annual Dibner Lecture on December 1st, 2021. Turner will explore a few lesser-known tales of Smithson’s work in a talk entitled “What Was James Smithson Doing in the Kitchen & Classroom?” Ahead of his lecture, Turner shares his recreation of Smithson’s coffee recipe.

Between 1849 and 1851, Johan George Heck published his encyclopedia Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexicon and the work continues to offer valuable insight into life in the 19th-century.

Serena Katherine “Violet” Dandridge (1878-1956) was one of the Smithsonian’s first female scientific illustrators and a supporter of women’s suffrage. Dandridge grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1896 to study art.

We’re excited to announce a new round of internships for Summer 2023.  These opportunities provide hands-on experience in a range of subject areas and are open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Each unique project offers a chance to explore current topics in archives, libraries, and information science and learn from experienced Smithsonian Libraries and Archives staff.

These internships include a variety of on-site and remote options, part-time and full-time. All include a stipend. The application deadline is February 13th, 2023.

The Zoological Gardens and Aquariums Ephemera Collection began as an all-call for interesting memorabilia relating to zoos, aquariums, gardens, or the societies that support such institutions. Many items were received, cataloged, and filed in cabinets located in the former library space at the National Zoological Park (Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC). A previous attempt was made to rehouse, organize, and digitize parts of the collection, but the project was left incomplete.