Special Collections

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.

An activist, a teacher, a poet — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an extraordinary figure in American history. She was born free in the city of Baltimore in 1825, orphaned at the age of three, and grew up under the tutelage of her uncle Rev. William Watkins.

Long before Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, or Martha Stewart, Lydia Maria Child provided American women with tips and tricks for running a smooth household.  Her most successful book, The Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy, was first published in 1829 and went through 33 editions.  Though Child is often remembered for her domestic guidance, her literary legacy includes a heaping helping of activism.

The skies of 2021 will provide quite a few celestial events for the amateur astronomer. National Geographic notes a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in February, a “Blood moon” total lunar eclipse in March, as well as other astronomical events throughout the year. If you’re a backyard star-gazer with your own telescope, you’re in good company.

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.

Calling all coloring enthusiasts! #ColorOurCollections is back for 2021 and we have a brand new coloring packet just for you. We’ve teamed up with our colleagues at Smithsonian Institution Archives to bring you ten coloring pages to help break your winter boredom. Download them now!

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.

We’ll be busy over the next few months and you’re invited. Interested in Women’s History? Want to get a closer look at our collections? Join us for an upcoming event!

To celebrate National Library Week and the start of spring, we’ve put together another round of digital jigsaw puzzles! We hope these cheerful florals brighten your screens and bring you a few moments of peace, minus the pollen.

Curious about our conservators’ favorite books or trickiest treatments? While they’ve had to step away from the bench during the pandemic, our Preservation Services staff have been hard at work describing some of their remarkable conservation techniques in video form.

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.

Na au iki a me na au nui o ka ʻike: The little and the large currents of knowledge.

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.

Over the course of 175 years, the Smithsonian has grown to encompass 21 museums and nearly a dozen research centers—becoming a global organization working across history, culture, and science. How a stranger’s legacy became the world’s largest museum and research complex is a story full of surprising twists and turns of fate. What do we know about the Smithsonian’s mysterious founder, a man who left his fortune to the United States, a country he never visited?

This post was contributed by Isabella Buzynski, 2022 Summer Scholars intern with the American Art and Portrait Gallery (AA/PG) Library. Isabella is currently attending the University of Michigan School of Information for the Master of Science in Information program.

“It’s alive!” During the spooky season celebrated around Halloween, decorations and costumes of classic pop culture creatures abound, like Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster himself. Our modern conception of Frankenstein is a loveable zombie, tall and dopey with green skin and spiky hair, bolts and stitches. Originally published in 1818, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus actually tells the story of Dr.

Interested in exploring books and archives dating back to the 13th century? Join our summer rare book school!

This exhibition and blog post were curated and written by Joana Stillwell.

The color blue has had a long history in the Western world. The ever-changing role of blue has been used in bookbinding and the book arts to color manuscripts, maps, and scientific illustrations. Colorants used in inks, paints, and dyes have come from a variety of natural sources, including clays, gems, plants, and insects. Blue pigments were first made from imported minerals from Central Asia, eventually shifting to local resources within Europe.