Smithsonian Institution Archives

This paper applies two modes of interpretation to ethnographic photographs taken between 1884 and 1915 in the then German colony Cameroon (West Africa). The pictures are discussed in light of the recent anthropological debate on constructing knowledge about the Other, be it in written or pictorial form, that perpetuates and reinforces conventional stereotypes. The maker and his or her preconceptions are the main focus of this type of research. This reflexive mode of interpretation is contrasted with the documentary mode, prevalent among historians who emphasize the information on a specific time and place contained in the images. Thus far, both approaches have been applied exclusively of each other. While both modes of interpretation are valid in their own right, it will be shown here that the photographs must be treated as cultural and historical artifacts of their makers and equally as documents about the Other. Only then can their full meaning be grasped.

Classical scholars have begun to delineate the dynamic pattern of black classicism. This new subfield of the classical tradition involves the analysis of the creative response to classical antiquity by artists as well as the history of the professional training in classics of scholars, teachers and students in high schools, colleges and universities. To the first group belongs Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880-1969). Born in Fayetteville, NC, Chesnutt was the second daughter of acclaimed African American novelist, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). She earned her B.A. from Smith College in 1902 and her M.A. in Latin from Columbia University in 1925. She was a member of the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Her life was spent teaching Latin at Central High School in Cleveland, OH. This is the first full scale account of her career.

The web is the first stop for information seekers. As holders of the world’s cultural artifacts, cultural heritage organizations possess important information about the world throughout history. However, much of this is “locked down” unless information seekers make the effort to visit institutional websites. As a sector, we haven’t yet made our resources and scholarship accessible in the online spaces that knowledge seekers frequent.When Wikipedia launched in 2001, no one could have predicted its place today as the largest and most-used crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the world. As Wikipedia and its sister projects have taken the place as the gateway to the World Wide Web, cultural heritage organizations need to reconcile its place in the online information space. With the emergence of Wikidata, the central storage for structured data of Wikimedia sister projects, in 2012, cultural heritage organizations have the opportunity to “get on the ground floor” of leveraging their data in a free and open repository. This paper will look at how cultural heritage organizations can work with Wikidata, positioning themselves to become a more useful and accessible knowledge resource to the world.

Let us keep a place where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction." This was the response of a prominent North American naturalist opposed to a 1924 proposal to build facilities for women at the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory in Panama. In the first decades of the twentieth-century, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and as the United States built the Panama Canal, the American tropics became a major focus for North American politics and natural history, with government funding and logistical support from the military for scientific expeditions. As the North American western frontier closed, the New World tropics—or Neotropics—assumed the role that the West had played for an earlier generation of nineteenth-century explorers. In a post-Darwinian world, a field trip to the tropics with its rich biodiversity had become a rite of passage and a route to fame for young North American naturalists. And in the decades during and after the successful campaign for women's suffrage in the United States, tensions between men and women ran high, in the home, at the ballot box, and at the field station.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is an advocate and catalyst for digital preservation, enabling our members to deliver resilient long-term access to content and services, and helping them derive enduring value from digital collections.We raise awareness of the importance of the preservation of digital material and the attendant strategic, cultural and technological issues.We are a not-for-profit membership organization, and we support members through knowledge exchange, capacity building, assurance, advocacy and partnership.Our vision is to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow.The DPC Technology Watch Reports identify, delineate, monitor and address topics that have a major bearing on ensuring that our collected digital memory will be available tomorrow.They provide an advanced introduction to support those charged with safeguarding a robust digital memory, and they are of general interest to a wide and international audience with interests in computing, information management, collections management and technology.The reports are commissioned from experts after consultation among DPC members about shared priorities and challenges, and are thoroughly scrutinized by peers before being released.We ask the authors to provide reports that are informed, current, concise and balanced; that lower the barriers to participation in digital preservation; and that are of wide utility.These reports are a distinctive and lasting contribution to the dissemination of good practice in digital preservation.

Pamela M. Henson, Terri A. Schorzman; Videohistory: Focusing on the American Past, Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, 1 September 1991, Pages

The author summarizes and comments on the Archives Law of the People's Republic of China, which went into effect on 1 January 1988. He also notes the implementing regulations of 19 November 1990.

The long-term goal, as established by the institutional strategic plan, to digitize collections at the Smithsonian Institution along with the increasing need to share data and increase access to collections has made it essential to establish institution-wide metadata standards, including those for embedding metadata. This paper documents the ongoing process of establishing core embedded metadata within the institution through the work of the Smithsonian Embedded Metadata Working Group (EmDaWG), which is pan-institutional in nature and includes museums, libraries, archives, and research institutes. The focus of the working group described within this paper is the creation of core embedded metadata fields for use in still images.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) will soon upload its 60 millionth page of open access biodiversity literature onto the BHL website and the BHL's Internet Archive Collection. The BHL’s massive repository of free knowledge includes content that is available nowhere else online, as well as accessible versions of content that are locked behind paywalls elsewhere. If we are to continue to expand our understanding of life on Earth, we must ensure that the foundation of biodiversity knowledge provided by BHL is discoverable by the tools we rely on to navigate the ever-expanding internet. These tools – search engines and their algorithms – preferentially deliver (and rank) content with good metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs). In modern online publishing, PID assignment and linking happens at the point of publication: DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for publications, ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) for people, and RORs (Research Organization Registry IDs) for organisations. The DOI system provided by Crossref (the DOI registration agency for scholarly content) delivers reciprocal citations, enabling convenient clicking from article to article, and citation tracking, enabling authors and institutions to track the impact and reach of their research output. Publications that lack PIDs, which include the vast majority of legacy literature, are hard to find and sit outside the linked network of scholarly research. This makes it nearly impossible to determine whether they are being cited, let alone viewed, mentioned, shared or liked. At TDWG 2020, Page 2020, Kearney 2020, Richard 2020 (and 2019, Page 2019b, Page 2019a, Kearney 2019b, Kearney 2019a and 2018, Kearney 2018), we emphasised the need to bring the historic biodiversity literature into the modern linked network of scholarly research. In October 2020, BHL launched a new working group to do exactly this. The BHL Persistent Identifier Working Group (Team #RetroPID) brings together expertise from across BHL’s global community. Over the past year, we have worked tirelessly to make it easier to find, cite, link, share and track the content on BHL, adding article-level metadata to journals and retrospectively assigning DOIs (#RetroPIDs). Most importantly, we have developed the tools and documentation that will enable the entire BHL community to take contributed content from “just” accessible to persistently discoverable. This paper will detail our efforts to retrofit the historic literature (a square peg) into the modern PID system (a round hole) and will present both the achievements and the challenges of this important work.

"COMPENDIUM OF IMAGE ERRORS IN ANALOGUE VIDEO." Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 53(2), pp. 140–141

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) and the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) conducted a three-year pilot that explored preservation challenges with email collections. This paper reviews the acquisition model and workflow used based on the OAIS Reference Model. Rather than focusing on individual messages, the Collaborative Electronic Records Project (CERP) settled on preserving an account as a whole, maintaining the structure and relationships within a collection as well as simplifying metadata management. This paper also reviews some of the challenges with the email collections, including lack of organization and inclusion of non-record/sensitive material. Both archives also addressed the importance of sound recordkeeping practices and retention schedules and issued various guidance documents for depositors.CERP also collaborated with another research team (the EMail Collaborative Initiative (EMCAP)) to develop an XML schema capable of encompassing a complete email account and its content. The E-Mail Account XML schema defines a standard XML structure for preserving an email account along with its internal organization, its messages and attachments, and the interrelationships of the messages without sacrificing granular email message data. This paper describes the schema, its unique characteristics, and its value to the archival and digital preservation communities in the context of, and comparison to, other efforts to digitally preserve email.The schema structure positions preserved email accounts for multiple levels of searching strategies including: individual messages, account-wide, and cross-account search and retrieval. This helps to expose social networks and message interrelationships present in, and across, accounts.The E-Mail Account schema has made possible the preservation of large bodies of related e-mail in a single XML file, as demonstrated in the recent EMCAP and CERP projects. Unlike other work in the area of e-mail preservation, this XML schema is distinct in: 1) its account-based paradigm; 2) the granularity of data captured; 3) its alignment with the email message standard RFC 2822; 4) the support of a single XML file representation of the account; and 5) its incorporation into two separately developed e-mail preservation software applications.

By the mid-19th century, astronomy in the United States was productive and growing. Information gathered by and at the behest of the Smithsonian Institution shows that the community consisted of approximately 50 individuals, including a significant number of military officers, and a dozen observatories. Americans were deeply involved in astronomical research, and the discipline was entrenched in the college curriculum. What the discipline lacked was an adequate publication vehicle to ensure refereed, rapid dissemination of observations.

Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963) is widely regarded as the founder of Afro‐American anthropology. From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, he and his wife Frances produced an impressive body of research materials and scholarly publications on African and Afro‐American cultures, ‘virtually ignored among these materials is some 4,000 feet of motion picture footage and thousands of still photographs. This paper discusses Herskovits’ interest in using film records for studying body movement, gestures, and patterns of expressive behavior as persistent elements of the African heritage in the New World. The construction and style of imaging in two of his edited films is also discussed in relation to Herskovits’ scholarship and social and intellectual factors which prevailed at the time.

De leur collaboration fructueuse sur l’un des films les plus marquants de l’histoire cinématographique, 2001 : L’odyssée de l’Espace (1964-1968) jusqu’à leur tentative avortée, dans les années 90, pour développer une histoire inspirée de la nouvelle Supertoys Last All Summer Long de Brian Aldiss (finalement adaptée par Steven Spielberg avec I.A.: Intelligence Artificielle), Stanley Kubrick et Arthur C. Clarke entretinrent une longue amitié jusqu’à leur mort, qui fut décrite comme un « heureux mariage cérébral » ; les deux hommes se stimulaient l’un l’autre en s’échangeant des idées et se lançant des défis, et ce depuis la première lettre écrite par le réalisateur le 31 mars 1964, dans laquelle il fait part de son intention de collaborer avec l’auteur pour créer « le tant attendu “premier chef d’œuvre” de science-fiction au cinéma ».La relation qui s’établit entre l’écrivain et le cinéaste, essentiellement envisagée à travers le prisme des déclarations de Clarke au sujet du tournage de 2001 dans ses Mémoires, fut souvent décrite comme difficile voire conflictuelle, en accord avec l’image d’Épinal de Kubrick, le « génie dictatorial ». Grâce à l’étude de la correspondance conservée aux Archives Stanley Kubrick ainsi que dans la collection Arthur C. Clarke récemment ouverte au musée Smithsonian de l’état de Virginie, cet article propose de réexplorer cette collaboration en se concentrant sur certains moments cruciaux dans l’évolution du script de 2001 ainsi que sur les problèmes liés à la publication du roman éponyme. Enfin, nous reviendrons sur la seconde collaboration des deux artistes, actuellement peu étudiée, lors de l’adaptation de Supertoys ; nous pourrons ainsi comparer ces deux expériences et considérer les évolutions quant aux attitudes, aux méthodes de travail et aux intérêts du duo à travers le temps.

Utilizing crowdsourcing to make an organization's cultural heritage material more accessible can be a cumbersome and resource-intensive process. Without a digitization workflow designed to facilitate the use of image sets in multiple ways on a variety of platforms, large-scale crowdsourcing would be out of reach for the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). However, such a workflow can also be a natural extension of regular operations. SIA's incorporation of crowdsourcing preparation into its normal digital preservation and access operations demonstrates how an organization can achieve higher levels of audience engagement and acquire high-quality enriched data while avoiding heavy impacts to existing staff resources. This brief article outlines digitization workflows, material selection, and the underpinning principles and practices that the SIA employs and offers these as one possibility for organizations to consider before embarking on such a project.

Abstract The Smithsonian's Field Book Project presents a “fusion” of metadata standards to meet the access needs of a diverse user base and to set the framework for establishing best practices for managing field book collections. The key access challenges around field books stem from a lack of best practices when it comes to collection management and description. Field books are unique materials that sometimes fall under the auspices of departmental libraries or laboratories (item level description), sometimes archives (collection level description) and just as often can be found intermingled and uncataloged in museum collections and curators' offices (little to no description). These varying forms of custodianship result in collection management and descriptive practices that are not consistent across or even within institutions. The Field Book Project draws on existing standards and community input to develop a structured online resource for contributing and locating field book content. This poster provides examples of user needs related to field books; illustrates the use of different metadata schemas within the system and how they have been linked together to bridge collection and item level descriptions; and invites discussion on the potential impacts in terms of establishing best practices, improving access, and leveraging the technological capabilities of XML to expand content and features in the future.

Since the start of the National Anthropological Archives digital imaging program in 1999, the archive has produced over 100,000 digital assets from archival material to include sound recordings. Several of the projects have promoted outreach and access to the collections through avenues of collaboration. Working with both source communities and researchers, our collections are continually reaching new audiences and are being used in creative ways. In a web 2.0 and social networking world, the NAA is looking ahead towards new ways to promote access. This paper highlights considerations, challenges and successes in achieving these projects.

critiqued as the intellectual architecture of capitalist slave economies and Native American genocide that created our current environmental catastrophe-a contradiction that deserves further attention.Indeed, Lauren Perry-Rummel is correct in her assessment that these texts have had an outsize impact in defining mainstream environmentalism and literary studies in the United States; we are forced to reckon with their perspectives on nonhuman animal life.But to what degree can their insights be successful in averting our global environmental catastrophe when they rely upon the same intellectual frames that generated the problem?This reckoning is not a game of author identity politics but comes from the need to weed out the white settler-colonial epistemologies that root our environmental perspectives and continue to pollinate our thinking.

Although best known for his research on electromagnetic induction, Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was also very interested in astronomy, and particularly the application of physics to astronomical research. This paper explores Henry’s interest and his failure to make a greater impact on astronomy.

A refugee from Lithuania, Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019) arrived in the U.S. in 1947 and built a successful career in the competitive, male-dominated post-World War II New York’s art world. Beginning with small ceramic tile artworks that evolved into multi-media mosaics, Kasuba’s artistic vision expanded to shaping architectural spaces. From 1953 to 1970, appearances in exhibitions organized by the Museum of Contemporary Craft introduced her art to American and international audiences. Her pivotal solo exhibition at an important New York gallery in 1966 led to complex collaborations with noted architects for projects in major U. S. cities. Her innovative monumental designs in marble, brick and granite were focal points of public buildings and spaces. This article examines her key commissions completed from 1970 to 1986 in Chicago, New York City, Rochester, N.Y., Buffalo, N.Y., and Washington, D.C.