Smithsonian Libraries

Seeking Applications for 2013 Dibner and Baird Resident Scholars!

Situated at the center of the world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian Libraries is a vital part of the research, exhibition, and educational enterprise of the Institution. Each Smithsonian scholar engages in an individual voyage of discovery using the artifacts and specimens of the Smithsonian Institution in conjunction with the Libraries’ written and illustrated record of the past. The Libraries is uniquely positioned to help scholars understand the continuing vitality of this relationship, via exceptional research resources ranging from 13th-century manuscripts to electronic journals.

 

Stipends of $3,500 per month for up to six months are available to support scholarly research in the Special Collections of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries in Washington, DC and New York, NY, in an extensive range of subject areas. Historians, librarians, doctoral students, and postdoctoral fellows are welcome to apply.

The Spencer Baird Resident Scholars will use collections including rare books in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History (pre-1840 works on topics such as botany, zoology, travel & exploration, museums & collecting, geology, anthropology, and James Smithson’s library); World’s Fairs printed materials from the 19th and early 20th centuries (located at the Dibner Library, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum/ National Portrait Gallery, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and National Museum of American History libraries); manufacturers’ commercial trade catalogs at the National Museum of American History Library; rare materials in the history of ballooning, rocketry, and aviation from the late 18th to the early 20^th centuries at the National Air and Space Museum Library’s Ramsey Room; European and American decorative arts, architecture, and design collections from the 18th to the 20th centuries at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum Library’s Bradley Room; and rare materials on the history of art and artists, exhibition catalogs, catalogues raisonnés, and artists’ ephemera at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library.

The Dibner Library Resident Scholars will use Th e collection of the Dibner Library contains over 20,000 rare books and 1,800 manuscript groups covering a wide variety of subject areas and time periods. Th e strengths of the collection are in the fields of the physical sciences, particularly mathematics, astronomy, classical and Renaissance natural philosophy, theoretical and experimental physics (especially electricity and magnetism), engineering technology, as well as scientific apparatus and instruments. The periods covered range from early printed works of ancient Greek and medieval scholars through the Renaissance and Early Modern eras up through the 19th century. The collection includes significant holdings of works by Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Sacrobosco, Regiomontanus, Apian, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Laplace, Euler, Gauss, Oersted, and many others.  The Dibner Library is located in the National Museum of American History on the Mall in Washington, DC.

 For further information about the Resident Scholar Program, including application forms and procedures, please visit the SI Libraries’ website: www.sil.si.edu/Galaxy.cfm?id=3.3. Additional inquiries may be addressed to SILResidentScholars@si.edu or Smithsonian Institution Libraries / Resident Scholar Programs / P.O. Box 37012 / NMAH 1041 MRC 672 / Washington, DC 20013-7012. Resident Scholars are required to be in residence during the award period, which must be taken during the 2013 calendar year. All application materials must be submitted by March 15, 2012.

 

Image: Reading machine or book wheel from Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine, 1588 by Agostino Ramelli

Starting the New Year with something very old

Our oldest bound volume in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries is from circa 1280. It gives me a thrill every day that I can actually take off the shelf and hold in my hand a 730 year-old book! The text of the codex is in meticulous fine lettering in Latin, hand-writing of course, on smooth parchment. Page to page one can see the beautifully even layout, the red and blue markings for the end of the paragraphs and the occasionally occurring multicolored big initial letters. The first section of the book is a very detailed index making it possible for the reader to find certain names and topics in the volume.

 

 

The index is followed by the first text page which usually takes the viewers’ breath away. On the margins and within the large initial letters brilliant little illuminations appear: ornamental decoration, small figures, garlands, flowers and plants. All the vivid colors, including gold, have taken the test of times very well. Did the medieval artist know the content of the book? Can we draw conclusions from the decoration regarding what the text is about? Probably not; however, there is a delightful harmony between this first decorated page and the following literary work.

 

 

That is because the book is actually a compendium of things in nature, written by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the 13^th century famously knowledgeable Franciscan monk. The title is The properties of things. This does not give us much concrete information about content.  On further examination it turns out that this very general title covers a work that best could be described as an encyclopedia. The subjects are early science and medicine, natural philosophy, natural history, the nature of things in the world in general, explained by the knowledge and intellectual tools that were given in the 13^th century.

 

 

The French great Encyclopedie comes to mind. That wonderful series of (in its first edition) 35 folio volume set also intended to compile the general knowledge of its age, but in the 18^th century, in the age of the Enlightenment. The difference is striking: 35 huge volumes compared to the one much smaller one-volume Latin Bartholomaeus manuscript; but the intention was very similar. Both works are early predecessors of  encyclopedias; of Wikipedia, if we wish to draw a modern parallel. My favorite of the three “Wikipedias,” however, is still the Smithsonian’s 730 year-old manuscript by Bartholomaeus.

— Lilla Vekerdy

The handwriting of Galileo

Would you like to see Galileo’s hand-writing?—I asked a visiting friend who came to see highlights of the Dibner Library in the Smithsonian Institution Libraries the other day. In the age of mobile devices, email messages, texting and the many other forms of digital communication are we still interested in the way someone writes by hand? Does that provide any other kind of information besides the text?

 

 

These questions came to me much later because my friend very quickly answered “yes” to my first question. So, I headed to the temperature and humidity controlled secure stacks to the manuscript section, where the library holds the ca. 1600 manuscript groups that were donated to the Smithsonian by Bern Dibner, 20^th century engineer, inventor and science historian, in 1976. I carefully removed the folder that contains the letter from the archival storage box and took it to the reading room where my friend was sitting. I told him about the content of the letter and its story which is interesting.

Galileo wrote this letter on May 12^th, 1635 (in Italian) replying to his colleague and supporter, the French amateur mathematician and natural philosopher, Nicolaus Claude Fabri de Preiresc. Their correspondence had started years earlier mainly about Preiresc’s repeated appeals to Cardinal Barberini (Pope Urban VIII) to lighten the restrictions of Galileo’s house arrest he was under due to his sentence at his 1633 trial. The letters (as this particular one too) discussed scientific topics as well, among them a curious water clock developed by Franciscus Linus in Liège.  The clock consisted of a small globe balancing and rotating in water contained in a larger round vessel. Next to the globe was a small fish hovering in the water and pointing to the numbers on the small globe showing the hour of the day. According to the letter, the clock was driven by a mysterious magnetic force. Galileo used the occasion of discussing Linus’s water clock to describe his own similar model that he developed some years earlier. Then he quickly added: “I, meanwhile, have wished to indicate […] that I have not usurped the invention from Father Linus—if indeed his machine does not have any more to it than mine.”

 

 

“Beautiful, even hand-writing”—said my friend looking at the letter—“It does not bespeak about a crushed, oppressed old man’s state of mind.” And this should remind us that, in fact, Galileo did not suffer in the casemates of the Inquisition, since he revoked some of his scientific ideas. This made it possible for him to have a prolific time during his years following the trial and publish one of his most significant works, the Discourses concerning two new sciences. The book, published in Leyden in 1638, is considered by many Galileo’s main contribution to physics, in which he laid down the foundations of the modern science of dynamics.

—Lilla Vekerdy

Gearing up for the Archives Fair!

Blogs across the Smithsonian will give an inside look at the Institution’s archival collections and practices during a month long blogathon in celebration of October’s American Archives Month. See additional posts from our other participating blogs, as well as related events and resources, on the Smithsonian’s Archives Month website.

 

The Smithsonian Libraries is getting ready for tomorrow's Archives Fair! This event is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Archives and Special Collections Council (SIASC) and features a lecture series as well as an "Ask the Smithsonian" Q&A session. In addition, you can meet and chat with Smithsonian archivists and librarians as they host tables representing their units. Our own rare books cataloger, Diane Shaw, will present during the lecture series on "Highlights from the Manuscripts Collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science & Technology". During the day, she will be joined by  digital image librarian Erin Rushing and Lilla Vekerdy, Head of Special Collections, at the Smithsonian Libraries table.

If you were intrigued by Diane's post last Friday on Mary Smith, check out more of her work on the Smithsonian Collections Search Center blog today! And for more information on the Archives Fair and Archives month, see the Archives of American Art's webpage. If you'll miss the chance to experience tomorrow's activities in person, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will be live blogging the event on their blog.

 

An example of but one archival item in our collections, this scrapbook of Theodore Roosevelt consists of various clippings and photographs pasted in to Roosevelt's book,  African Game Trails. The scrapbook, housed in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History National Museum of Natural History,  is part of the Russell E. Train Africana Collection.