Smithsonian Institution Archives

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.

1996 marked the 150th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution. It was also in that year that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) published Asian Pacific American Resources at the Smithsonian. This resource brochure was meant to aid teachers, students, and researchers by providing them with information on Smithsonian collections, databases, publications, fellowships, internships, and more that were of significance to Asian Pacific Americans. The OPA also produced similar brochures on African and African American, Latino, and Native American resources.

Join the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives at the Smithsonian National Education Summit on July 27^th-28th, 2022. This is a free, two-day, online and in-person program hosted by the Smithsonian for educators, librarians, media specialists, and policymakers nationwide.

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?

As a current graduate student studying for my Master’s in Library and Information Science, I have a passion for digital archives and information organization. Throughout my own research, I have identified the importance of digital preservation and access to information and data. For my internship I worked with the Smithsonian Institution Archives Digital Services staff as part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Summer Scholars Internship Program.

Today, on the Smithsonian’s birthday, we are pleased to celebrate the launch of a new, refreshed, and greatly expanded web exhibition, Smithson to Smithsonian.  

During my time in the Kathryn Turner Diversity and Technology Internship, I worked with my mentor to create a program/software that would take completed projects from the Smithsonian Transcription Center and clean up the data even further. However, I first had to begin with understanding what I was ‘cleaning up’.

What does it take to paint a wildflower that blooms for a single day in a deep forest? For Mary Vaux Walcott, it involved spending up to seventeen hours a day out of doors with her paintbox to capture the shape, movement, and colors of delicate petals and leaves.

During American Archives Month, we’re highlighting the work of our Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative in a series of posts. This is the first post in the series.

During American Archives Month, we’re highlighting the work of our Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative in a series of posts. This is the third post in the series.

This Black History Month, we’re excited to introduce the #FunnList: a spotlight on Black women in science from Smithsonian history.

The Funn List builds off the Smithsonian Funk List, the brainchild and namesake of Vicki Funk (1947-2019). Now maintained by American Women’s History Initiative Digital Curator Liz Harmon, the Funk List is an ever-expanding data set documenting over five hundred Smithsonian women in science, past and present.