Smithsonian Libraries

Botanica Magnifica

As a follow up to our post from last week…you can watch the CBS News Sunday Morning segment on Botanica Magnifica  in an eight minute clip on YouTube. Enjoy!—Liz O'Brien

Libraries exhibition featured on Art Daily.org

Art Daily.org, "The First Art Newspaper on the Net" recently featured two Libraries exhibitions, Picturing Words: The Power of Book Illustration and The Art of African Exploration on its website. —Elizabeth Periale

Orchids Through Darwin’s Eyes Exhibit at NMNH

For this year’s annual orchid exhibit, which celebrates Charles Darwin’s 200^th Birthday, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (SIL) has played a small, but pivotal role.  In the middle of the exhibit room, you will find a beautifully displayed first edition of Darwin’s book, On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilized by insects and on the good effects of intercrossing published in 1862.  It is bound in a plum cloth with an orchid gilt on the front cover.  You’ll also find quotes from this book on several of the interpretation panels.

In this book, he describes the relationships between orchids and the insects that fertilized them.  The observations Darwin made by studying orchids and their pollinators, gave support to the theory of natural selection that he describes in his more famous book “On the Origins of Species”.  “Fertilization of Orchids” was praised at the time by his contemporaries in natural history and botany. 

However, initially, the book was not a bestseller, selling only six thousand copies by the turn of the century.  Later editions found the title shorten a bit by removing “On”,“British and foreign” and "and on the good effects of intercrossing". Darwin updated the second edition which was published in 1877.  Today, the book is still in print and considered an important early work in the science of orchidology and pollination biology.   

The exhibit Orchids through Darwin’s Eyes is located on the first floor of the National Museum of Natural History from January 24, 2009 to April 26, 2009.  Go to:   http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/orchids/index.html

 

Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays in 2008!

All through 2008, the Smithsonian Libraries has been celebrating the 40th (Ruby) anniversary of the year (1968) that Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley created the Smithsonian Institution Libraries as a separate unit with a central administration and Director. We had a party for our Smithsonian friends and colleagues in April, and Acting Secretary Cristián Samper gave us $40,000 for acquisitions, a dollar for every year.  We held a symposium about 18th century naturalist Mark Catesby with the Washington premier of the film “The Curious Mr. Catesby,” which you may see on your local PBS station in the coming year. 

With Smithsonian colleagues, we sponsored a speaker series that brought thinkers and experts from outside the Institution to talk about their views of the future of libraries, archives, and museums. We engaged a consultant to lead us through a strategic planning process that will start us off well for our next 40 years! 

On October 30, we hosted our Ruby Anniversary Gala, “Paint the Town REaD!” to raise funds to support our art libraries.  And we opened two exhibitions: Picturing Words:The Power of Book Illustration in the just re-opened National Museum of American History, and The Art of African Exploration in the National Museum of Natural History. Whew!

It has been a busy time, but now we will all stop and reflect on the needs of others and the joys of the holiday season.  We wish everyone well for the coming year.

Nancy Gwinn

The Art of African Exploration

In the town of Ujiji in what is now Tanzania, Henry Morton Stanley, sent by a New York newspaper to track down the missing Dr. David Livingstone, finally found the man on this day, November 10, in 1871. Many had believed the ailing missionary and explorer to be dead. 

Their meeting has become legendary - even in its day it was the focus of media attention.  African exploration was a hot topic in the Victorian era in both the U.S. and Britain, capitivating the public's imagination with tales of adventure and discovery and paving the way for the West's colonialist claims on the continent. 

In a forthcoming SI Libraries exhibition, set to open December 9th at the National Museum of Natural History, African exploration is examined using an array of visual materials that emerged from that critical and complex time.  All but a few of the items on display come from the Russell E. Train Africana Collection (kept in the Cullman Library), a collection rich in illustrated and original materials.  Included in the exhibit are collectibles and ephemera, lantern slides (like the one shown above), early guide books, scientific illustrations, travel narratives, and actual explorer's sketches and journals, spanning from 18th century accounts of voyages to original field sketches from the early 1900s. 

We hope you'll come out next month to see some of these uncommon and intriguing items.

 

SIL Joins LibraryThing

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries is pleased to announce its participation in Library Thing. This free online service was originally created to help people catalog their own books more easily and has become a great way to link readers to books, interests and each other.

Combining the best of a commercial bookseller’s website and a typical library catalog, Library Thing takes book browsing to another level. It’s a fun and useful tool to work alongside the SIRIS catalog, not replace it, and connects users to the people and books that have helped build SIL. Users can now explore the personal library of James Smithson or the “Heralds of Science” collection of Bern Dibner on Library Thing. Smithson and Dibner join the likes of Leonardo daVinci, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin in the “Legacy Libraries” section which contains inventories of the book collections of notable figures.

Researchers can also utilize Library Thing by selecting records from SIRIS (one of 690 catalogs already integrated) to create personalized bibliographies or book lists. Users can make recommendations, create reviews or organize titles by creating their own tags. Because of the social aspect of Library Thing, patrons can connect with other users, find those with similar research interests and take a look at what their colleagues have collected.

James Smithson’s library on LibraryThing.com:
http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=JamesSmithson

Bern Dibner’s “Herald of Science” collection on LibraryThing.com:
http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=HeraldsOfScience

Outreach with the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Their museum may not be open yet, but the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is already reaching out to a national community by holding events such as their "Save Our African American Treasures: A National Collections Initiative" in cities around the US.  The program is a series of one-day events designed to encourage individuals and families to identify, protect and preserve  "family treasures" for future generations.

Saturday, September 13th, was the third event in the series, and was held at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, DC.  It was a full day of classroom presentations on preserving clothing, textiles, photographs, and paper, and also establishing provenance.  There were a number of conservators and curators on hand in the "Hometown Treasures" room for one-on-one review sessions with participants who had brought in up to three items from their personal collections.  Participants brought in all kinds of treasures, including photographs, portraits, letters, bibles, and quilts and met with reviewers for advice on proper care and handling of artifacts or help with identifying exactly what they had.

Eliza Gilligan, a Book Conservator at the Smithsonian Libraries, volunteered at the event in the Hometown Treasures room.  It was a great day of looking at remarkable treasures, including a letter from Toronto, dated April 20, 1865, describing the city's reaction to the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  Many of the items that people brought in for review were in very good condition, showing the value and consideration people have placed in their family history. 

The Botanist's Desire: Botanica Magnifica Redux

Back in May I posted a story about the exhibition of Botanica Magnifica in the Smithsonian Libraries' exhibition cases in the National Museum of Natural History. Well, in this month's Fine Books & Collections Magazine, Botanical Magnifica is featured in the cover story, "The Botanist’s Desire" by Jonathan Shipley (No. 34, July/August 2008).

In addition to a number of reproductions from the work, the article describes the process used by photographer Jonathan Singer in creating the work. Smithsonian botany curator John Kress also discusses the importance of the work.

Smithsonian Libraries on Flickr

The Smithsonian joins the Flickr Commons project on June 16!

The Smithsonian Libraries provided a selection of photographic portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. These portraits, part of a larger collection of over a 1,000 portraits in various media. The entire collection is available online at Scientific Identity: Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.

The Flickr Commons project provided Smithsonian staff an excellent opportunity for collaborations between our different museums and researcher centers. In addition to providing content, Smithsonian Libraries staff provided important technical and metadata skills which enhanced the success of the project.

• Visit the Smithsonian on the Flickr Commons
• See the Smithsonian Libraries "Portraits of Scientists and Inventors"

Flickr Commons is a new forum created by Flickr for cultural institutions to share their photographic collections. The Smithsonian was the fourth institution to join, following the Library of Congress, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.

About the Dibner Library Portrait Collection (Ron Brashear)

The scientific portrait collection in the Dibner Library was assembled by Bern Dibner. The images formed a fine research complement to the thousands of scientific books and manuscripts in the library he founded, the Burndy Library. Bern Dibner obtained most of the portraits during the 1940s from print dealers in Boston, London, and Paris. By 1950 he had about two thousand images and arranged them into ten scientific subdivisions: Botany, Chemistry, Electricity, Geology, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Technology, and Zoology. The portraits are of various types: woodcuts, copper and steel engravings, mezzotints, lithographs, oil paintings, and photographs. Many of them are images that were printed as separate items, used as gifts to send to colleagues and admirers. The exchange of portraits among scientists in the eighteenth century became a very popular form of correspondence. A number of prints also served as frontispieces of books and, unfortunately, a few of the prints in the collection had originally been bound as pages in books and removed some time in the distant past.

(photo above left: Portrait of Felix Nadar (1820-1910), Photographer and Aeronautical Scientist; see the picture on Flickr or in Scientific Identity)

Hard Hat Tour of Pennsy Drive facility

2008-05-29-dscn3908
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Smithsonian Libraries' staff visited the new Pennsy Drive facility near Landover, Maryland on May 29.

The Pennsy Drive facility will house the Book Conservation Lab, the SIL Imaging Center, binding operations and also provide a reading room and shelf space for over 500,000 volumes.

The Libraries will begin moving into the new space sometime in the fall.

Pictured above: (left to right) Dave Bartlett, Lu Rossignol, Marcia Adams, Martin Kalfatovic, Nancy Gwinn, Laudine Creighton, David Holbert, and Eliza Gilligan