Smithsonian Libraries

Planning for the NMAAHC branch library

When The President of the United States and the Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) break ground on February 22, 2012, it will be the beginning of a new adventure for Smithsonian Libraries.  Plans for the museum include locating the library in wonderful space on a public floor with direct public access.  Mary Augusta Thomas and Bill Baxter have been working with the staff of the NMAAHC space planning team, including representatives from the education department, the center for media arts and collections. We all enjoy the challenges of planning for a highly interactive information commons and a research library with a program that is only now being defined.  Our joint vision is for a place that visitors will come with questions raised by their time in the exhibitions.  These might be about objects in the collections, or the location of a museum or cultural center in their vicinity. 

In addition, the museum and library will offer resources and training in genealogy, another first for SIL.  In addition, the library reference specialists will provide onsite assistance with databases, a collection expected to be about 20000 volumes’ and a scholar’s workstation for visiting fellows and researchers.  Library users will be able discover resources throughout SL and retrieve items quickly. SIL is also in discussions about offering services to support archives research.   SIL selectors have been tagging books for the new museum for several years so a beginning collection is currently located at the Anacostia Community Museum Library.   The Libraries will bring a new librarian on board in the next year to work with planners and researchers at the Museum on those important first exhibitions and ongoing programs.

 

 

—Mary Augusta Thomas, Deputy Director

Images: Construction from Constitution Ave (top) and Signage from 15th Street (bottom).

New and Notable in November

We're testing out a new way of displaying our "New & Notable" books by combining them in to one post per month. Also, above the book listings, you'll see a slideshow with links to the WorldCat records for each book. If you are not a user of our physical collection, WorldCat will help you find a copy of the book in a library near you. If you enjoy our "New & Notable" section, we would love to hear your comments below.

 

 

From the National Museum of American History Library:

	Underwear : fashion in detail / / Eleri Lynn ; photographs by Richard Davis ; drawings by Leonie Davis. V&A, c2010. GT2073 .L96 2010 NMAH COSTUME
	Railroaded : the transcontinentals and the making of modern America / / Richard White. W.W. Norton & Co., c2011. HE2751 W55 2011
	Troubled experiment : crime and justice in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 / / Jack D. Marietta and G.S. Rowe. University of Pennsylvania Press, c2006. HV6793.P4 M37 2006
	The American style : Colonial revival and the modern metropolis / / Donald Albrecht, Thomas Mellins. Museum of the City of New York : Monacelli Press, c2011. NA7238.N6 A43 2011  NMAH DOMESTIC LIFE
	A history of the Internet and the digital future / / Johnny Ryan. Reaktion Books, 2010. TK5105.875.I57 R73 2010

 

From the National Air and Space Museum Library :

	American Flying Boats and Amphibious Aircraft: An Illustrated History by E.R. Johnson.  McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2009.  TL684. J65 2009
	Blazing Skies: Air Defense Artillery on Fort Bliss, Texas, 1940-2009 by John A. Hamilton.   Army Defense Department, Washington, DC  2009.  UA32. H265 2009
	How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfareby Walter J. Boyne.  Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, Louisiana, 2011.  UG1230. B69 2011
	John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon by John M. Logsdon.  Palgrave Macmillan, New York, New York, 2010.  TL789.8 U5 L64 2010
	Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux.  MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011.  TL1550. D46 2011

~ Selections from Trina Brown & Leah Smith

 

 

New & Notable Additions to the AA/PG Library in March

Patterson, Cynthia Lee. Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Patterson examines the five monthly magazines called the Philadelphia Pictorials that came out of that city in the 1840s. Geared towards middle-class readers, these magazines were all distinguished by their “embellishments” of engravings and illustrations used to entice readers. Although there were other means for art engravings to reach the public in the 1840s, these five magazines reached a wider audience than any other distributor of American art. The author argues that these periodicals were the primary mechanism for the circulation of original American art in the 1840s. Due to their popularity, the magazines could afford to provide a modest remuneration to American artists and writers while providing an exposure to the arts so desired by the middle class. Patterson’s study provides a scholarly focus on these important previously underappreciated media.

Green, G. Michael and Roger D. Launius. Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman. New York: Walker, 2010.

Few owners of a Major League Baseball team have been as colorful as Charlie Finley, the owner of the Oakland A’s team that won three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974. Beginning as an insurance businessman, Finley purchased the A’s franchise in 1960-1 while the team was still in Kansas City. Once in Oakland the emergence of players such as Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Catfish Hunter, and Vida Blue turned the team into a powerhouse. Finley micromanaged the team, at times in essence serving as the team’s manager and assembling the team, while hiring and trading players. The authors provide a detailed look at the Finley’s life and career. They describe him as a “despot and a whiner and a bully and a liar” while at the same time a “strategic thinker, a big-idea man, and a visionary” and credit him many innovations to MLB.

Cleveland, David A. A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920. New York: Hudson Hills, 2010.

Tonalism is a style of American painting that began in the Gilded Age and faded out around the second decade of the twentieth century around the end of the First World War. Influenced by the Barbizon movement, Tonalists were more concerned about capturing the mood and emotion of a landscape rather than mere replication of the scenery. Even though the movement dominated American art for four decades, most of the artists have faded from popular memory despite including among their ranks Thomas Wilmer Dewing, George Inness, John Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler. Cleveland sets to rectify this by focusing on over sixty artists and placing them as the originators of American modernism. This history seeks to reveal the genius of American Tonalism in “all its splendor.”

—Doug Litts

Personal Digital Collections

A recent article in BusinessWeek (http://buswk.co/h8pnfS) profiled a Japanese company that provides homes with some needed extra space. A recent startup, Bookscan, offers scanning of personal book collections in part for customers to more efficiently use their domestic space. As many know, Japanese homes are generally much smaller than North American homes and one can imagine that the elimination or reduction of a bookshelf can be a very valuable expansion of living area.

In addition to services such as those offered by  Bookscan, major manufacturers have begun introducing increasingly sophisticated consumer scanning technologies (an example from ION Audio pictured here). There have even been attempts with personal cameras and other equipment (http://bit.ly/fNqHrt) to scan entire volumes for personal use.

One thing is clear: it has never been easier to create personal digital collections than it is now and that's one reason a Digital Library group was recently formed at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. In addition to licensing content from commercial publishers and scanning our own books, the SIL is beginning to handle a wide variety of digital materials created outside the professional publishing world. However, the acquisition and management of this type of content in library collections demands forethought and the development of a coherent approach.

Most data management and digital library experts agree that early management intervention of digital material (preferably at the time of creation) is the best way to ensure that the content will survive and be usable even in the short term. And the SIL's new Digital Library group aims to ensure that electronic materials are easily discovered, usable and integrated into the larger Smithsonian digital world. The group plans to meet regularly, relying on the perspective of all SIL staff to recommend work flow and practices for specific situations and material-types. All staff are welcome to attend DL meetings and either contribute their own experience or learn more about the collection and management of this material at SIL.