Smithsonian Libraries

Introducing...Digital Services Division

L-R: Grace Duke, Richard Naples, Alvin Hutchinson, David Holbert, Keri Thompson, Martin Kalfatovic, Conrad Ziyad, Erin Thomas, Erin Clements Rushing

This newly renamed division is headed by Martin Kalfatovic, Assistant Director for Digital Services. The Digital Services Division (DSD) oversees all digital services for the Libraries including the web presence, coordination of web 2.0 activities, digitization of Libraries' content through both its own Imaging Center and contracted services, and imaging use (including image licensing and product development & licensing).

Information Services Unit—Alvin Hutchinson heads up this newly organized unit. Richard Naples reports to Alvin and works on all unit projects. Conrad Ziyad works on projects in this unit as well as in other units of the Division. Alvin is the Libraries representative to the Smithsonian’s Information Technology Management Committee (ITMC) and is the liaison to the Smithsonian Office of the Chief Information Officer on desktop support issues. The Information Services unit provides the following services to Smithsonian and Libraries staff:

• Maintains and promotes Smithsonian Research Online (SRO), research.si.edu, the program that consists of the Smithsonian Research Bibliography and the Smithsonian Digital Repository (SDR). The SRO serves as the record of Smithsonian scholarly output in all formats. The SDR maintains digital copies of much of this scholarly output.
• Provides support for other technology systems including ILLiad and Odyssey.
• Technical support for desktop applications not covered by OCIO. Richard Naples is the key person in the Division for questions related to moving computers, printers, etc.

Web Services Unit—Keri Thompson heads up this newly organized unit. The Web Services unit replaces much of the functionality of the previous New Media Office. Keri’s chief responsibilities are day-to-day maintenance and enhancement of the website, production of new digital projects on the web, and database management. She serves as the main contact to the OCIO’s Web Services Division. Keri is also the coordinator for all Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) scanning. In this task, she is assisted by two library technicians, Grace Duke and Erin Thomas. Erin and Grace’s primary duties are related to the review and scanning of materials for the BHL project.

Imaging Center —David Holbert coordinates all activities at the Imaging Center located at Pennsy Drive, near Landover Md. David is also our resident expert in imaging technology. The Imaging Center serves as the primary location for digitization of more fragile Libraries material and those that need rush or other special treatment. The Imaging Center maintains both an overhead scanning back camera with book cradle and a large format flatbed scanner.

Image Management and Product Development & Licensing—Erin Clements Rushing coordinates all image use for the Libraries. Erin works extensively with Libraries staff to transfer materials from their locations to the Imaging Center or externally to the Libraries for contract digitization services. As the main contact with Smithsonian Enterprises, Erin works with the Smithsonian’s Product Development & Licensing unit to create a wide variety of licensed images that are sold in Smithsonian shops as well as through catalogs and retail outlets. She also coordinates all direct licensing of Libraries' content with publishers, video producers, and others. Erin is the point person for copyright and other rights issues. She is not a lawyer, but she is in regular contact with the Smithsonian’s Office of the General Counsel to assist Libraries staff in questions related to intellectual property.—Martin Kalfatovic

Research Bibliography Data Re-used by Museum Departments

The Smithsonian Research Bibliography has collected citations for over 1600 Smithsonian-authored publications during the 2008 calendar year. Smithsonian Institution Library staff collect and edit this publication data which is of value to several audiences within the Institution including administration at different levels. For this reason it makes sense to re-use the information wherever possible to avoid a duplication of effort in collecting and editing the references. In recent months several museum departments in the Museum of Natural History have begun re-using this centrally-collected data to dynamically create publication lists for curator web pages. In addition, many of the citations listed on individual curator pages are hyper-linked to the corresponding full text of the publication if it is available in the Smithsonian Digital Repository.

To see an example this data re-use, look at the staff publication lists for NMNH curators, Storrs Olson or Mark Littler . The bottom portion of each page contains a list of recent publications which is updated in real-time as the master Research Bibliography is updated. It is hoped that in the near future other museums and research departments will also exploit the availability of this information to supplement their web content.

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

North American Indian Photograpy of Edward Curtis now on Flickr!

Wedding party - Qagyuhl
Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution

Check out SIL’s newest contribution to the Smithsonian Commons on Flickr, the Native American Indian Photography of Edward Curtis:

http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/sets/72157607176299398/

For more information about the work of Edward Curtis, visit our online exhibit here:
http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/Curtis/index.htm

WiFi @ SIL

Smithsonian Libraries is very happy to announce that we can now offer both SI staff and visiting researchers wireless access to the internet in 11 of our library locations!
So, if you are coming to visit us in person at any of these libraries, you can bring your laptop!

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Library (New York, NY)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library (Washington, DC)
John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology (Washington DC)
Joseph F. Cullman 3rd, Library of Natural History (Washington, D.C.)
Museum Support Center Library (Suitland, MD)
National Museum of American History Library (Washington, DC)
National Museum of Natural History Library - main reading rooms (Washington, DC)
Smithsonian American Art/National Portrait Gallery Library (Washington, DC)
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (Edgewater, MD)
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Library (Republic of Panama)
Vine Deloria Jr. Library, National Museum of the American Indian  (Suitland, MD)

Portraits of Scientists and Inventors

A little preview of Smithsonian Libraries images. These are available on the Smithsonian Flickr Commons as well as on the Scientific Identity: Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.

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)