Smithsonian Libraries

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.

The Russell E. Train Africana Collection: An Archival Safari

On October 22, 2010, the Libraries participated in the Smithsonian Archives Fair to celebrate American Archives Month. Special Collections Cataloger, Diane Shaw, delivered a presentation about the archival materials of The Russell E. Train Africana Collection, which contains several thousand manuscripts, photographs, original artwork and prints, posters, maps, ephemera, and man-made and natural artifacts relating to exploration, big game hunting, wildlife, and travel in Africa dating from 1663 to the late 1990s. Formerly part of the private collection of Judge Russell E. Train of Washington, D.C., these materials were acquired by SIL in 2004, together with over 1500 printed books, which are all housed together in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History. 

The Russell E. Train Collection covers an amazing diversity of topics, with items by and about such notable people as President Theodore Roosevelt; the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone; journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley; taxidermist Carl E. Akeley; naturalist Edmund Heller; traveler Richard Francis Burton; author Ernest Hemingway; artist Sir John Everett Millais; and documentary filmmakers Osa and Martin Johnson; among others. A number of the items are also related to the history of the Smithsonian, including Theodore Roosevelt's 1909-1910 African expedition, where some of the animals now in the Natural History Museum's collections were acquired.  The materials in the Russell E. Train Collection have greatly enhanced the Libraries' ability to support research in African art and natural history.

A webcast of all of the Smithsonian Archives Fair presentations is available on the Archives Month website; the Russell Train Collection presentation begins at 0:28:00. The slides from the talk are included here:

 

The Russell E. Train Africana Collection: An Archival Safari through Photographs, Sketchbooks, Manuscripts and Other Materials from the Smithsonian Libraries

—Diane Shaw

Biodiversity Heritage Library meetings in Australia

Martin Kalfatovic, along with the Biodiversity Heritage Library Technical Director, Chris Freeland, attended the kick-off meeting of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia node meetings in Melbourne and Canberra in early June.

In Melbourne, the meetings were held at the Melbourne Museum. Housing both natural science as well as historical collections, the Melbourne Museum is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Dr. Ely Wallis, project leader for the BHL-Australia, served as host and guide for the visit in both Melbourne and later Canberra. While in Melbourne, there was also an opportunity to visit the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne.

Meeting with staff from numerous libraries in Australia, discussions about selection, prioritization, and workflow of mass scanning were discussed. A special tour of the museum's library was also conducted. Staff displayed a number of rare items from the collections, including Georg Rumpf's D'Amboinsche Rariteitkamer (1705) and the proofs of the unpublished third volume of Frederick McCoy's Prodromus of the zoology of Victoria (c. 1891). You can read a longer account of the BHL staff visit in the Melbourne Museum newsletter.

Following on the visit to Melbourne, the group traveled to Canberra for meetings with the staff of the Atlas of Living Australia (the parent organization to BHL-Australia), hosted by ALA Director, Donald Hobern. BHL technical staff Phil Cryer (Missouri Botanical Garden) and Anthony Goddard (Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) gave a technical overview of the BHL storage infrastructure to the assembled group.

The meeting also saw the final signing of the agreement between BHL and BHL-Australia to partner on creating open access taxonomic literature. W. Mark Lonsdale (Chief, CSIRO Division of Entomology, on behalf of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO] and the parent organization of the Atlas of Living Australia) became the final signatory, completing the agreement authorized by Cristián Samper (Director, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, on behalf of the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Encyclopedia of Life) and J. Patrick Greene (CEO, CEO of Museum Victoria). Also attending the reception and signing event was Sen. Kate Lundy (Canberra, ACT), a supporter of biodiversity, Web 2.0, and networking  related initiatives in Australia.

Martin Kalfatovic also gave a general overview presentation of the Biodiversity Heritage Library at the National Library of Australia for around thirty interested staff. This presentation was bookended by meetings with NLA staff involved in a variety of digitization projects (including newspapers) and the development staff of the NLA's Trove project.

- Martin R. Kalfatovic

Presentation for the National Library of Australia

An Introduction to the Biodiversity Heritage Library

View more presentations from Martin Kalfatovic.

TELDAP 2009 International Conference, Taipei, Taiwan

During the week of February 23-27, 2009 TELDAP International Conference held in conjunction with Global Research Library 2020 and MCN Taiwan Meeting in Taipei, Taiwan.

TELDAP is a nation-wide and centrally-funded project to bring together the cultural and scientific projects in the digital environment.

The TELDAP organizers did an excellent job of bringing together a world-wide group of collaborators to share their own experiences and work with participating TELDAP institutions to analyze the work of TELDAP.

Myself and Michael Edson, Director of Web Strategy in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) were invited to give an overview of library, archives and museum collaborations, and web strategy for the MCN Taiwan portion of the meeting. Our session, attended by about 150 people, was well received with many comments and questions. You can find my presentation, “A Natural History of Unicorns: Smithsonian Collaborations in the World of Library, Archives, and Museums” is available online.

• TELDAP 2009 Home page
• GRL 2020 Home page

—Martin Kalfatovic