Smithsonian Libraries

For the Gardeners and Garden Admirers...

2009-07-16T09:00:00-04:00

Now that it has stopped raining every day, you may want to get out at lunch and explore some gardens. Two garden related events are going on near the National Mall throughout the summer…

The Smithsonian’s Horticulture Services Division has tours of its gardens until mid-September—see their website for a schedule.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has established the People’s Garden, with classes at the Friday Farmer’s Market. You can also follow the People’s Garden on twitter.

Healthy Garden Workshops at The People’s Garden - Learn Healthy Gardening Techniques at The People’s Garden Booth

Fridays at USDA Farmer’s Market - 12:00 Noon to 12:30 pm, Rain or Shine*

Where: USDA People’s Garden, 12th & Jefferson, SW, Washington, DC
Metro: Mall exit of the Smithsonian Metro Station, Orange/Blue Lines

Workshop Schedule 2009:

July 3: Watering Your Lawn and Garden
July 10: Make-Up Day #1
July 17: Container Gardening and Window Boxes
July 24: Weeding and Removing Invasive Plants
July 31: Installing and Using Rain Barrels
August 7: Make-Up Day #2
August 14: Attracting Pollinators: Friends of Healthy Gardens
August 21: Inviting Wildlife with Bat Boxes and Other Backyard Habitats
August 28: Maximizing Your Harvest
September 4: Make-Up Day #3
September 11: Making and Using Compost
September 18: Choosing and Using Fertilizers
September 25: Fall Maintenance: Preparing Your Garden for Next Season

* Except when thunder and lightening or other dangerous outdoor conditions exist

—Robin Everly Botany and Horticulture Library

W. Atlee Burpee & Co., Burpee's Seeds Grow (1945), Philadelphia, PA, from Seed Catalogs digital collection

Anniversary of the first Boeing 707 Flight

2009-07-15T13:56:50-04:00

In this day in history—July 15—we commemorate the anniversary of the first flight of the Boeing 707 prototype, nicknamed the "Dash 80," which took place in 1954. Its maiden flight took off from Renton Field, just south of Seattle, Washington. The Dash 80 made its mark in aviation history, paving the way for trans-Atlantic jet service between New York and Paris (which Pan American World Airways would undertake in 1958). The innovations developed on the prototype 707 led to commercial planes with longer fuselages, bigger wings and higher-powered engines.

To celebrate this achievement in aviation history, we have a wide variety of 707-related resources within our collection. Recommended titles include William Cook's The road to the 707: the inside story of designing the 707, Ugo Vicenzi's Early American jetliners: Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8 and Convair CV-880, and Barry J. Schiff's The Boeing 707. If all that has piqued your aviation interests, our own National Air and Space Museum Library preserves an extraordinary collection of older technical reports related to the development of aviation, aerospace engineering, air transport aircraft, air commerce, air traffic control, air navigation and civil aviation which have been gradually acquired by our branch over the past 30 years from all of the principle government and aerospace industry libraries, including among others: NASA, the FAA, the former Civil Aeronautics Board, and the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences.—Brett Lambert

Le quatorze juillet

2009-07-14T09:00:00-04:00

Happy Bastille Day!

Lieutenant-colonel (Ninian) Pinkney, Travels through the south of France and in the interior of the provinces of Provence and Languedoc, in the years 1807 and 1808, 1814, Map of France

Caldwell Lighting project @ the Smithsonian staff picnic

2009-07-13T09:00:00-04:00

L to R: Doug Dunlop, Metadata Services; Keri Thompson, Web Services; Jen Cohlman, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum Library

Each year at the Smithsonian staff picnic on the National Mall, the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars sponsors a "research tent" that allows Smithsonian staff to share their current and upcoming research projects with colleagues. This year, the Libraries featured our work on the Caldwell & Co. Lighting project. As always, it was wonderful to see what research projects or exhibitions our colleagues are working on. There was even another lighting related project (!) "The Challenge of Domestic Illumination in the 19th Century" from the National Museum of American History - but it focused on patents and technology rather than design.

The Caldwell project was great to work on not just because the collection is great, but because, like all our digital projects, it gave Libraries staff the opportunity to collaborate across our various departments and share ideas about new ways to provide access to our collections.

For the Caldwell photo archive, we tried to provide wider access to the collection and bring it to potential audiences by putting select images on the flickr commons, experiment with geotagging images that had lighting fixtures from known locations, and creating wikipedia articles on the company.—Keri Thompson

In case you missed it...

2009-07-12T09:00:00-04:00

L-R: Dr. William Noel, Anne Van Camp (Director, Smithsonian Institution Archives), Nancy Gwinn (Director, Smithsonian Institution Libraries), and Marcia Adams (Assistant Director for Technical Services, Smithsonian Institution Libraries)

Dr. Noel Archived!

If you missed Dr. William Noel’s June 29 lecture, “Deciphering the Archimedes Palimpsest and Creating Digital Manuscripts,” please tune in on our archived webcast! Libraries Director Nancy Gwinn introduces Noel’s lecture, which is the first segment of the Libraries’ 2009 series of speakers to address the Smithsonian Institution on the future of libraries, museums and archives in a digital world.

The lecture was attended by over 70 people, so thanks to all of you who came out to the event!

William Noel, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, lectured on the conservation, imaging and scholarship of the Archimedes Palimpsest, a privately owned codex that has been revealed to contain unique texts not only of Archimedes of Syracuse, but also of Hyperides, an Athenian orator from the fourth century BC, and of Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle’s categories. Dr. Noel discussed the history of the book and the history of the project, its digital presentation on the web, and other manuscript imaging projects currently underway at the Walters Art Museum.

Other Libraries webcasts in this series, and on diverse topics, are also available.—Liz O'Brien

Dog Days of Summer

2009-07-11T09:00:00-04:00

Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-seven Hours and Twenty Minutes, and a Trip around it. Trans. by Louis Mercier and Eleanor King [De la terre à la lune], 1874. 'Diana and Satellite."

The two dogs, Diana and Satellite, figure prominently in the first part of the story; they are forgotten when the capsule returns to earth. Verne may have composed the ending much later than the rest of the book.

Some of us like summer and its accompanying heat, but others have dubbed the middle of July the dog days of summer...

—Elizabeth Periale

Libraries represented at 24th Annual NASIG meeting

2009-07-10T09:00:00-04:00

Recently, the Libraries sent Polly Khater, the serials cataloging coordinator, to the 24^thAnnual Conference of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG), which was held June 4-7, 2009, in Asheville, North Carolina. The theme for this year’s meeting was “Riding the Rapids through a Mountain of Change.” The kickoff vision speaker was Peter Morville of Semantic Studios. His talk, Ambient Findability: Libraries, Serials, and the Internet of Things, centered on web design, findability, and searching. Mr. Morville began the session with the statement “Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.” He created the information honeycomb, pictured below, which shows how aspects of information fit together. One statement that generated audience discussion was that people aren’t really motivated to tag resources for others. When people tag images on Flickr or books in LibraryThing, for example, the tags are for their own purposes of organization and findability, not for others who might use or look at the same materials.

Throughout the three days, many discussions and sessions were held on staffing, budget issues, return on investment studies, open access journals, preservation and ownership of electronic journals, and software tools used to manage serials. An overwhelming topic for participants was the economy and the resulting budget implications; practically all libraries in attendance are dealing with fewer funds for print and electronic journals, combined with fewer staff throughout the library. Polly delivered a talk on the last day of the conference on the tool the Libraries uses to manage electronic journals, titled Using a Local ERMS to Manage E-Journals: Can It Get Any Better Than This? It was well attended for an early morning session, and good discussion was had on the practices and procedures for managing electronic journals.

The conference closed with a talk from Geoffrey Bilder, of CrossRef. His talk, What Color is Your Paratext?, focused on the issue of information credibility. As the scholarly society transitions further onto the online environment, the heuristics we’ve used to designate scholarly resources and peer reviewed materials have changed, without much discussion or awareness. Mr. Bilder cited the book written by Anthony Grafton, The Footnote (which is held in the Special Collections Dibner Reference Collection), as an interesting text on the evolution of scholarly research.

NASIG, established in 1985, promotes communication, information, and continuing education about serials and the broader issues of scholarly communication. The annual conference provides a casual venue for preconferences, formal sessions, practical workshops, special events, and networking. An emphasis on thoughtful discourse and informality promotes an intensity of purpose not always possible at other conferences.—Polly Khater

Comparing Notes on Digital Repository Management

2009-07-09T09:00:00-04:00

In April 2009, Alvin Hutchinson, Information Services Librarian, visited the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University (SMU) to exchange ideas with the digital repository staff there. Alvin has visited Singapore several times and he frequently makes time to meet with research librarians.

The Li Ka Shing library opened its doors in 2005 and is naturally a state-of-the-art building including spacious and comfortable reading and study areas. Although the library print collect includes just 30,000 volumes, its users have access to over 30,000 electronic journal subscriptions and 23,000 e-book titles. The Li Ka Shing Library serves SMU’s six schools covering the disciplines of business, accountancy, economics, social sciences and information systems. These schools have established research centers in collaboration with such well-known names in the business world as the Wharton School and BNP Paribas.

The SMU repository uses a software platform by well-known library vendor Innovative Interfaces, Inc., which also provides the library's integrated management system and public catalog. The SMU digital repository team consists of a full-time repository manager (Paolina Martin) and a metadata librarian (Ryun Lee) who devotes approximately half of his time to the repository. Repository staff expressed remarkably similar circumstances to the Smithsonian Digital Repository including recognition of the likelihood that library staff will ultimately be responsible for collecting and uploading content created by researchers at the University. The SMU staff also indicated that they may be called upon in the near future to assume the role of the University's bibliographer. This is a service that the Libraries currently provides and complements the Smithsonian Digital Repository. The conversation was lively and quite informative.

Alvin left the meeting with a sense of reassurance that there is at least one other organization operating successfully with such a small staff yet accomplishing so much.—Alvin Hutchinson

The Libraries wants YOU!

2009-07-08T09:00:00-04:00

Don't worry, not all the work is so glamorous!

Hoover Company, Hoover: The Story of a Crusade, 1926, Hoover test of woman vacuuming

There are many behind-the-scenes folks who volunteer to help out our wonderful staff and libraries. So far the total number of volunteers in 2009 is fifty-three!

The Libraries would like to thank all of our wonderful volunteers.—Vicki Avera

Smithsonian American Art/National Portrait Gallery Library
Elliot Bernstein
George Baker
Valerie Florez
Janet Miyazaki
Donelle O’Meara
Kristen Oravec
Michael Washington

Warren M. Robbins Library, National Museum of African Art
Doris Brunot
Monique Craig
Monique Medalia
Miranda Mims
Lillian Pharr
Judith Schaeffer

Cataloging
Sherry Kelley

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Library (New York, New York)
Roma Korris
Nina Levy
Kay Badalamente
Jeffrey Figley
Anna Shuster
Ruth Hyman
Renata Rutledge
Margery Masinter
Susan Hermanos
Susan Solnay
Marilyn Friedman
Sue Ellen Appleman

Joseph F. Cullman 3rd, Library of Natural History
Ann Stone
Marlena Larsen

Digital Services
Lex Grant

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Library
Ling Cui
Isabel Dagata
Anna Gleysteen
Yumi Hendershoot
Bounheng, Inversin
Lynne Kaufman
Hsun Lui
Kinu Matsuyama
Anna Novick
Sirikanya Schaeffer
Kanae Whitlock
Alex Williams
Ling Zhang

National Museum of Natural History Library
Maggie Ansell ---volunteer/ intern
Joan Horn
Lesley Parilla ---- volunteer/intern
James L. Smith
Linda Soto

National Museum of American History Library
Betty Spungen.

Vine Deloria, Jr. Library, National Museum of the American Indian (Suitland, Maryland)
William Gheen.

Preservation
Andra Risch
Genevieve Bieniosek

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Library (Republic of Panama)
Diane Hopkins
Abigail Eden
Carmen Sánchez

N is for noodles...

2009-07-07T09:00:00-04:00

David Pelletier, The Graphic Alphabet, New York: Orchard, c. 1996, Gift of Patricia Fendley Dunston, N, Noodles

Happy National Macaroni Day.

And remember, N is for noodles...

From Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration, currently on exhibit at the National Museum of American History.—Elizabeth Periale