Vicarious research is one of the great joys of the reference desk at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. From our front-row (well, only-row) seat outside the reading room, we catch tantalizing glimpses of our patrons’ manifold research topics.

The reference team fields around 6,000 queries per year. Ask us what people have been researching recently, and you’ll get into some of the enlightening, weird, and fascinating details of our collections. Here is a sample of the diverse questions SIA’s researchers have been exploring for the past few months!

Over the past three months, researcher projects have delved into:

• The Galapagos murder mystery
• Hawaiian clothing collections from the U.S. Exploring Expedition
• Phylogeny and biogeography of crane flies
• Design in the Service of Tea, a 1980s Cooper Hewitt exhibition
• Leonard Stejneger and the Steller’s sea cow
• UFO activity in Salt Lake City
• The history of surveying
• Nobelist Riccardo Giacconi‘s handwriting

Permissions for upcoming publications using our photos or documents include:

• Photo of Arts and Industries Building ethnology workroom for Hillary Olcott’s upcoming book, Yua, Spirit of the Arctic
• Images of taxidermied animals for Mary Anne Andrei’s upcoming book, Nature’s Mirror: How Taxidermists Shaped America’s Natural History Museums and Saved Endangered Species
• Portrait of Dr. Meredith L. Jones and a worm for Naomi Oreskes’s upcoming book, Science on a Mission: Oceanography from the Cold War to Climate Change
• 1901 image of Arts and Industries Building exhibit hall for Noémie Étienne’s upcoming book on the history of dioramas
• Photo of archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington for a display at the Ice Age Fossils State Park Visitor Center

You ever heard of Jonce McGurk
who claimed, “SI's my place of work”?

(But it wasn’t?)

While conducting research in Record Unit 311, I came across the story of art dealer Jonce McGurk. McGurk lived in New York City in the early 20th century, offering appraisals to art buyers and auction houses. He corresponded with the Smithsonian, too; letters from the early 1920s offered promises to look out for authentic Gilbert Stuart paintings, and he made introductions between art collectors and the nascent National Gallery of Art. 

McGurk's Smithsonian connection, however, may have soured almost immediately. A notice from Charles G. Abbot, then Acting Secretary, called out McGurk’s letterhead that titles himself a “Consulting Expert Smithsonian Institute and National Gallery of Art U.S. Gov't. Institutions.” Despite his past invaluable assistance, Abbot pointed out, McGurk never had a formal contract with the Smithsonian. The  Secretary diplomatically concluded, “I...feel sure that, with this expression of the Institution’s views on the subject, future action regarding it [the letterhead] may well be left to your own good judgment.”

Yet, years later, the National Gallery was still receiving mail alluding to their “consulting expert.” By December of 1932, Ruel P. Tolman, Acting Director of the Gallery, had evidently had enough. Atop a memo accompanying yet another question about portraits of George Washington, Tolman penciled a note: “The dirty Crook.”

Related Resources

• Hot Topix in Archival Research, Spring 2019, by Deborah Shapiro, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Hot Topix in Archival Research, Winter 2019, by Deborah Shapiro, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Hot Topix in Archival Research, Fall 2018, by Deborah Shapiro, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Hot Topix in Archival Research, Summer 2018, by Deborah Shapiro, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

It's the last day of the 2019 Arctic Bird Fest! [via Audubon Society]

The UN Archives has launched an interactive highlighting the records of its peacekeeping missions. [via UN Archives]

DCist explores how Washington’s museums are preparing for the ever-increasing likelihood of flood events. [via DCist]

WAMU takes readers inside the Washington Monument stairwell, which has been closed to the public since 1976. [via WAMU]

A digital art project exposes the racist bias in a popular image database. [via Hyperallergic]

A U.K.-based charity offers free visits to historic sites as a form of therapy! [via NCPH]

New research reveals the wisdom and street smarts of cleaner shrimp. [via New York Times] 

The Archives is made up of wonderful, helpful, and hard-working individuals who strive to acquire, preserve, and make accessible records that document the history of the Smithsonian Institution. Some of our staff have been at the Smithsonian for more than thirty years, while others are just beginning their tenure here. There will be some changes in the office as we welcome new staff members coming on board this past summer who bring their expertise and new ideas to the Archives. 

Continuing our series on introducing new staff, I’d like to welcome our Institutional History Program Assistant, Hannah Byrne. 

What's your educational background?
I received my BA from Birmingham-Southern College in 2016 where I majored in history. I also recently earned my MA in public history from American University.  

What do you do at the Smithsonian Institution Archives?
I’m the program assistant for Institutional History. I help respond to reference requests, work on the oral history collection, and conduct research on the history of the Smithsonian Institution.

What is the strangest/most interesting thing you have discovered at the Archives so far?
I was reading an oral history of Helena Weiss, the first female manager at the Smithsonian and former registrar, and I learned that one curator over at Natural History once had some live poisonous snakes sent over for an exhibit. The snakes landed at Washington National Airport in a crate, and the airline refused to handle them and insisted Weiss come with her car to pick up the live poisonous reptiles and drive them back to the museum. I’m sure there’s an accession file with all of those details from the drive back to the museum with a crate of snakes somewhere. 

What is the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about working here?
The Smithsonian is an impressive institution with museums and research centers across the globe, but it is also a place made up of wonderful, sometimes quirky, and always dedicated folks. Learning about the people who make up this place can lead down some exciting and unexpected paths.

Favorite spot in DC to recommend to visitors? 
I always recommend going to Ercilia’s in Mount Pleasant for some pupusas.

We kicked off American Archives Month with another successful #AskAnArchivist Day on social media. We rallied a team and headed to Twitter and Instagram to answer all of your burning questions. And there were GIFs. All of the GIFs.

Do you try to preserve/save everything? If not what materials do you keep?

Jennifer: This is a good one! If we find a document or a story that we find particularly interesting, we assume the world will too! That being said, we have appraisal criteria and a Smithsonian-wide records disposition schedule.

Do you have tips for affordably rehousing and scanning a collection of hundreds of thousands of negatives currently in poor condition? 

Marguerite: If affordability is an issue, just rehouse using *better* materials. Grab acid-free envelopes at a stationary store. In terms of digitization, the prices of scanners has actually recently gone down. I would also digitize and rehouse at the same time.

We managed to get a competent scanner but manpower is a is a major issue as it takes several minutes to scan 1 out of 200,000+ negatives.

Marguerite: Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. The costliest part about rehousing and digitization is time. There are numerous grants you can apply for that may cover the costs of rehousing materials, temporary staff, and digitization equipment.

Are you only archiving the Smithsonian born digital materials? If so what types, or are you archiving external born digital content?

Ricc: The Archives documents the history of the Smithsonian, its staff and a few organizations affiliated with it. The vast majority of what we take in is from the Institution, but we are archiving some external born digital content. Whether the digital content comes from the Smithsonian or another organization, the formats are all over the map: images: documents, manuscripts, CAD blueprints, audio, video, databases, email, websites, social media, research data…easily over 1,000 formats.

How does one become an archivist?

Emily: You’re in luck! We have a whole series with ~free~ career advice. 

Can you use gifs to describe good practices for a researcher?

Deborah made us really proud with these answers.

How do you accept digital donations (USB sticks etc.) and maintain cyber-security for the Institution?

Ricc: Everything comes in on removable media (USB sticks, etc.) is required to be scanned for viruses, malware, etc. on a standalone machine. It has to pass the scan. 

How would you archive something like a video game which is A) more active than passive in consumption and B) may require specific old/rare hardware to run properly? 

Ricc: Like Atari's Bank Heist from 1983? We would develop an emulation of the original environment (operating system, etc.) allowing us to run the original software in its original format in a way that behaves and displays like it did in 1983, minus the game controller.

Related Resources

• “#AskAnArhivist 2017: You Asked, We Answered,” by Effie Kapsalis, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives 
• “You Asked, We Answered: 2015 Ask an Archivist,” by Effie Kapsalis, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Artist Himali Singh Soin’s upcoming film will feature the research of Archives fellow Alexis Rider! [via New York Times]

Marine biologists have been measuring whales with aerial drones. [via Erin Ruberry]

Emma Carroll, the University of Edinburgh’s “Witchfinder General,” has mapped the accused women from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. [via Smithsonian] 

Talk about Deep Time—new research suggests that Australian rock formations contain the fossils of 3.5-billion-year-old microbes! [via New Scientist] 

The Arlington Public Library’s Center for Local History recently received a batch (technical term) of repatriated regional records. [via Arlington Public Library] 

The British Library has created a web portal for 270 of its digitized sacred texts. [via infoDOCKET] 

Watch an early 20th-century painting be repaired by a MoMA conservator! [via Fletcher Durant]

Nine years ago I wrote Happy Paper Anniversary?—a year’s celebration of the Archives’ conservation lab becoming a manifest presence within our primary location. Since then, we have continued to grow, undertake unusual challenges, take on many interesting projects, and welcomed and said farewell to many staff, volunteers, interns and fellows we’ve supported from around the world. Many of our alumni have gone on to become graduate students, professional conservators and leaders in their own right, while some have carved new paths in related careers, including forensics and material engineering sciences. Some even fell in love…with each other!

Rather than focusing our lens on projects, we thought this should be a celebration honoring some of the many folks who have passed through our portal. (If you don’t find yourself pictured, note that it may just be because we don’t have a non-peering-through-the-microscope picture of you. Feel free to send us a selfie from your time here to add to our alumni album!) 

In honor of the tenth anniversary of the lab, here is a glimpse into our own photographic history, in which we rely neither on tintypes nor direct prints on aluminum, but present a slideshow of images brought to you in part by multiple base, precious and rare metals, and as ever, photons. 

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Postgraduate Fellow in Conservation Beth Antoine prepares samples of iron gallotannate copying inks for artificial aging and treatment tests, assisted by volunteer Ricardo Penuela-Pava. 2010. Photo: Nora Lockshin

Volunteer Valarie Platz surface cleans Watson Davis’ Personal Papers in the processing room. 2011. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Win Suen and Elizabeth Childs help assess and move collections during the pilot assessment for the Field Book Project. 2011. Photo: Anna Friedman.

Sarah Stauderman gets back to the bench in a workshop for the Field Book Project interns. 2013. Photo: Kirsten Tyree.

An exo-sortie mission to assess an unususual immovable object – the Photomosaic Globe Of Mars, NASM A20130178000. Tessa Gadomski with colleague Lisa Young pictured in foreground. 2013. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

An exo-sortie mission to assess an unususual immovable object – the Photomosaic Globe Of Mars, NASM A20130178000. Greta Glaser measures photographic condition with a spectrometer-colorimeter. 2013. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Andrea K. Hall manages to maintain order of thousands of “toe tags” that had been removed from bird specimens to a ledger book at some point (we try not to do that today!).

Noah Smutz tries his hand at marbling on a “Fun Friday”, even if it appears to have been a Thursday. 2013. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Janelle Batkin-Hall and Kirsten Tyree try their hand at marbling on a “Fun Friday”, even if it appears to have been a Thursday. 2013.

Archives of American Art interns Sarah Casto and Marie Desrochers hang handmade solvent/heat-set repair tissues to dry. 2015. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Laura Dellapiana patiently poses for our “Faces of SIA” portrait corkboard at the start of her fellowship. 2015. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Alison Reppert Gerber expresses the sheer joy of appropriate waste management, while colleagues discuss something completely different in the background! 2018. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Melissa Carrillo and Joanna Shuker make custom heat and solvent-set tissues for the NMNH World of Maps project. 2018.

William Bennett and Miguel Resendiz look over the progress on humidification of the Dawson map. 2019. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Heather Weiss removes an unusual fastener from a thick document prior to its’ imaging – leading Miguel Resendiz (behind her) down an interesting path of searching Google Patents! 2019. Photo: Nora Lockshin.

Related Resources

• I'm Falling for You, by Effie Kapsalis, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Photomosaic Globe of Mars, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

In commemoration of National Dental Hygiene Month, the Smithsonian Institution Archives presents a selection of photographs of dentists and dental researchers from the Science Service collection, Accession 90-105.

National Museum of American History curator Audrey Blyman Davis (November 9, 1933 - August 29, 2006) brought these Science Service records to the Smithsonian. After Dr. Davis retired from the Smithsonian in 1993, she helped to found the Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, which is now a Smithsonian affiliate museum and is open (no pun intended) to the public throughout the year.

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Willoughby Dayton Miller (1853–1907), Dean, University of Michigan School of Dentistry, was one of the first oral microbiologists in the United States. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-6121.

John Albert Kolmer, M.D. (1886-1962), Professor of Medicine, Temple University School of Medicine and School of Dentistry. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-4925.

After teaching in the department of microscopic anatomy at the University of Arkansas Medical School, 1921-1925, Margaret Morris Hoskins (1886-1955) became a professor in the Department of Dentistry, New York University. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-3552.

(left to right) Brigadier General Neal Anthony Harper (1892-1970), chief of Dental Service at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and Major General Harry George Armstrong (1899-1983), U.S. Army Surgeon General. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-3515.

Henry Trendley Dean (1893-1962) was the first director of the U.S. National Institute of Dental Research and a pioneer in using fluoridation to prevent tooth decay. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-0920.

Charles Heston Patton (1897-1973), a Philadelphia orthodontist, became the 102nd president of the American Dental Association in 1960. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2009-1358.

In 1958, when this photograph was taken, Brig. Gen. Clarence P. Canby (1904-1994) was Director of Dental Activities, Walter Reed Army Hospital. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-0640.

In October 1948, Helen Elizabeth Walsh (1906-1997) was president-elect of the American Dietetic Association. Walsh served as chief of the bureau of nutrition for the California Department of Public Health, 1947-1971. She helped establish the school's public health nutrition program, was a founder and president of the Society for Nutrition Education, and advised on dental hygiene issues. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2010-0770.

In 1968, South African dentist Philip B. Blaiberg (1909-1969) was one of the first heart transplant recipients. This exclusive Science Service photograph showed Blaiberg in his hospital room, after the operation by Christian Barnard. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2007-0256.

Seymour J. Kreshover, D.D.S, M.D. (1912-2006), Director, National Institute of Dental Research. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 90-105, Image no. SIA2008-4965.

Related Resources

• "Audrey Blyman Davis, 9 November 1933-29 August 2006," by Ramunas Kondratas, Journal of the History of Science Society, 2008
• Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry, website
• Dental Chair, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, ID Number: MG.M-10600
• "The Tooth Fairy File," Smithsonian National Museum of American History YouTube Channel
• Dentist, ca. 1855, daguerreotype with applied color, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum, ID Number 1994.91.229
• Dentist Baseball Team, Howard University, 1930s, Black History Album Flickr

A new app guides DC’s tourists through spots that commemorate indigenous history. [via Thomson Reuters Foundation]

The National Zoo has welcomed two baby tortoises! [via National Zoo]

A Washington Post op-ed laments the “dire state of the D.C. Archives.” [via Kim Bender]

A Library of Congress blog post features some wildly entertaining 18th and 19th-century board games. [via Library of Congress] 

Thanks to a public domain map, archaeologists have identified dozens of ancient Mayan ruins! [via New York Times]

A new browser extension will drastically increase your daily art consumption. [via Nikhil Trivedi]

You may know how web archiving works--but what does it look like? [via infoDOCKET]

The Smithsonian Institution Archives continually strives to add more collection information to its website. This is a periodic post highlighting new acquisitions and individual collection items.

Over One Hundred New Finding Aids Online, including:

• Accession 18-100 - National Museum of Natural History, Division of Mammals, Correspondence, 1934-1939, 1956-2017. This collection documents the career of Richard W. Thorington (1937-2017), who specialized in systematics, evolution, anatomy, and functional morphology in mammals, especially of primates and squirrels. 
• Accession 18-172 - National Air and Space Museum, Aeronautics Division, Exhibition Records, 1978-2010. This collection documents documenting updates to the "Black Wings" exhibition.  The "Black Wings" exhibition opened in 1982 in the Pioneers of Flight Gallery and initially focused on the Tuskegee Airmen. The exhibition was periodically updated and its content broadened. 
• Accession 18-217 - National Museum of Natural History, Department of Entomology, Correspondence, 1949-1998. This accession consists of incoming and outgoing correspondence focusing on the study of mosquitoes. Topics include the Southeast Asia Mosquito Project, specimen collection, and distribution or loan of specimens from the Museum. 
• Accession 18-240 - Office of Public Affairs, Audiovisual Records,  1993, 1996, 1999-2014, undated. This accession consists of audiovisual recordings regarding the Smithsonian Institution, including interviews with media outlets, footage of events, exhibits, webcasts, and public service announcements. 

Forty-seven Finding Aids with New Links to Digitized Material, including:

• Record Unit 321 - National Museum of American Art, Office of Program Support, Records 1947-1981 (highlights are images of exhibitions, seminars and workshops) 
• Thirty-nine accessions of various Smithsonian websites, with links to preserved sites on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Examples include:
• The Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project website, crawled July 5, 2017 
• The National Museum of African American History and Culture website, crawled September 22, 2017 
• Biodiversity Heritage Library Consortium blog, 2007-2017, crawled April 21, 2017 

One Hundred Fifty-nine New Images Online:

• Over one hundred fifty images from Accession 90-105 - Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s (images of scientists) 

Related Resources

• Collection Higlights, July 2019, by Tammy Peters, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Collection Highlights, April 2019, by Tammy Peters, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Collection Highlights, January 2019, by Tammy Peters, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Collection Highlights, October 2018, by Tammy Peters,The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Collection Highlights, July 2018, by Tammy Peters,  The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

In the first act of Hamlet, the Ghost bemoans that, were he not “forbid” to describe his purgatory, he could unfold a tale that would make “Thy knotted and combined locks to part, // And each particular hair to stand on end, // Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.” Pity the poor porcupine! Shakespeare saw her defenses as a metaphor, with prickly spines raised in fear or alarm.

Three centuries later, a ten-year-old helped to reimagine those quills as a beautician’s tools.

The back story to an unusual image in the April 18, 1936, issue of Science News-Letter involved a lively scientific argument between zoologist Joseph Sedley Stanford (1891-1982) and Science Service biology editor Frank A. Thone (1891-1949). In the photograph, a porcupine appears about to grab the hair of a little girl, who is grinning, grimacing, and about to burst into giggles. The caption to “Ye Olde Porpentine Beauty Shoppe” explained that “Pook, pet porcupine of Prof. J. S. Stanford of Utah State Agricultural College, undertakes the somewhat Alice-in-Wonderlandish role of hairdresser to Miss Elaine Stanford,” adding that “Prof. Stanford says that young porcupines are easily tamed and make excellent pets.”

By the mid-1930s, loyal subscribers of the Science News-Letter peppered the news office with questions. Scientist-readers could be especially assertive when they believed that a news article contained errors or misleading conclusions. In his first letter on February 28, 1936, Stanford strongly disagreed with Thone’s recent assertion that porcupines were the principal enemies of Western timber. “Fire, insects, disease come first,” Stanford wrote, “and porky is a small 4th cause if even a 4th.”  He attributed the bad press to foresters who “don’t like porcupines.” In truth, “Porcupines are so easily killed that they are killed regardless of their proximity to any timber of value — or cattle (calves and colts are not so dumb).”

Thone thanked Stanford for his “candor” but defended the information source (a U.S. Forest Service employee) as “competent and scientifically honest” and claimed that the article had not implied that porcupines “are destructive in a major degree everywhere in the West.”

Their friendly debate continued in further letters, reflecting an ongoing struggle in the American West, as farmers, ranchers, foresters, and scientists each brought differing perspectives to the question of how humans should interact with wildlife. Stanford knew that prickly porcupines had insufficient lobbyists in the policy debates:  “With the cries of exterminate coming so frequently today from so called sportsmen and others who do not believe in control — if they know about it — one can, as I have, become rather sensitive when such a course is advised.” He did, though, praise the magazine in his reply (“May I add that we, dad, mama & the kiddies, read the S.N.L. articles and study the pictures and like them very much”), and then added a postscript that made the journalist’s news nose itch. “P.S. You may be interested to know that we received a porky 4 yrs ago when he was a small ‘pup’ and have him yet — a very interesting chap.”

A pet porcupine! Thone took the bait.

“My dear Prof. Stanford,” Thone wrote on March 14, “I envy you your pet Porky. I have always had a notion that porcupines should make good pets. Among other advantages would be a more or less automatic instruction of young children in the proper handling of animals, when they are in the kitten-squeezing stage! . . . More seriously: would you be willing to let us have a snapshot of one of the children playing with your Porky, for reproduction in the Science News Letter? It would make a really attractive picture.” Perhaps better education, Thone suggested, would produce “better mutual understanding ... with resulting eventual peace and large-scale restoration of American wildlife. 

Stanford replied that “Pook” had usually been photographed with a miniature camera, so there were no suitable enlargements. Instead, he sent three Verichrome negatives, “the middle one of Pook investigating Elaine my (now) 10 yr old daughter who is afraid of nothing — it seems.” That was the photograph that caught the editor’s eye.

But it was ten-year-old Elaine Loda Stanford (1926-2015) who had the last (and best) word, in a heartfelt letter preserved at the Smithsonian Institution Archives

When ten copies of the magazine’s April 18 issue arrived at the Stanford house, the scientist handed them to his daughter “with the statement that she & Pook are now famous,” he told Thone. “She was a muchly pleased little girl when she saw the picture and the name Porpentine especially caught her fancy. She readily acted on my hint that she ought to write Dr. Thone to thank him so her letter is enclosed.”

Here is a transcription of the handwritten letter forwarded by a proud father (from Record Unit 7091, Box 179):

Dear Mr. Thone,

            I appreciate the nice magazines you sent me and I am sure I can make use of them. Daddy told me you would like to hear about some of my adventures with snakes, Pookey and other animals we have had and have. First I will give you all the names of the animals we have now. Pook, Deer Mice, Rabbits, Rat, Gopher, Frog, Marsh Toads and we had some pigons [sic] but they flew away about two weeks ago. Now evey [sic] year Daddy has arranged a second of June hike for all of us. One time we were a good way up. we sat down to rest on a rock pile. I had lagged behind most of the way, so I wasn’t very tired.

            I went up about three feet and nearly stepping on him, I saw a snake. I took one or two steps back, and was about to pick it up, when I decided to call Daddy. So I did and he told me it was a rattle-snake. I am sure that I could tell one now if I were to see it. I have had many more experiences but I think this one is most exciting.

Your Greatful Friend,

Elaine Stanford

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Letter from Elaine Stanford to Frank Thone, 24 April 1936, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7091, Box 179, Folder 3, Image no. SIA2020-000005.

Letter from Elaine Stanford to Frank Thone, 24 April 1936, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7091, Box 179, Folder 3, Image no. SIA2020-000006.

Great, indeed. And not at all prickly.

Related Collections

• Science Service Records, Record Unit 7091

After forty years, NASA has updated its spacesuit fashions! [via Reuters Science]

The Native Land project maps the Indigenous territories that comprise the world's land. [via Popular Mechanics]

A team of artists retrofitted defunct call boxes with monuments to historic D.C. women. [via WAMU]

Andrea Hart of London’s Natural History Museum discusses the 19th-century “color guide” used by Charles Darwin. [via Washington Post]

Recent additions to the Internet Archive include thousands of playable computer games! [via infoDOCKET] 

Find the best leaf peeping with the Washington Post’s new interactive. [via Forest Service NW]

British Museum curator Hugo Chapman shows off some (18th-century) hot (air balloon) tickets. [via Max van Balgooy]

Forests operate on a spatial and temporal scale that demands wide-ranging and long-term observations in order to see change.  Taking a snapshot for one day, or in one hectare, confuses the immediate moment with the larger reality.  Recognizing this, ForestGEO takes a different approach. ForestGEO is a Smithsonian-led network of researchers and large-scale, long-term research sites in twenty-seven  countries. Over the last three decades, field crews at ForestGEO research sites have collected copious amounts of data that reveal the dynamic nature of forests. 

This past summer I began researching ForestGEO’s organizational history at the Archives.  Certain themes persisted over the years: a commitment to capacity building, long-standing partnerships with researchers and institutions, and a precedent of high-quality data collection. I was also intrigued to find an earlier emphasis on interdisciplinary and applied scholarship. Where current articles have examined functional traits, spatial distribution, and statistical methods, older pamphlets and newsletters consistently spoke to the need for a holistically-informed approach to the sustainable management of forests.  

I recently went to the Archives to collect images for a forthcoming history page on the ForestGEO website. There were specific documents that I had seen before and planned to return to, but I also had a shortlist of promising folder titles that I was keen to pursue.  And that’s when I stumbled upon it—it being “Bibliography: Publications Directly Resulting from Project Research.”  Printed in July 1999 on scrap paper with our old letterhead, this fourteen-page document held the promise of filling gaps in our publications database.  Any text that utilizes ForestGEO data is welcome to join this repository; identifying all such articles is an ongoing task. 

Sometimes principal investigators of ForestGEO sites reach out to staff to share a new article. Other times, I discover one through a Twitter mention. And then in other instances, it’s the magic of Google Scholar recommendations that alerts me to another piece of research that has used ForestGEO plot data.  With nearly thirty years as a network, ForestGEO data has been central to more than 1,000 publications, but our publications database didn’t start tracking them until the early 2000s.  We had records for a handful of early research papers but suspected that there were others we didn’t know about and, consequently, wouldn’t be able to recover for our database. 

Which brings us back to the Archives. Upon finding the bibliography, I had visions of rescuing early papers from analog invisibility. Indeed, in the following weeks I was able to cross-check the bibliography with our publications, and add over forty publications to the database.  What particularly piqued my interest, though, was the inclusion of articles from journals like Environment and Development Economics, Land Economics, and Economic Botany.  Overwhelmingly, ForestGEO papers cover topics of ecology.  That has been, and will continue to be, the bread and butter of ForestGEO.  But in a different historical moment—in a younger organizational self—ForestGEO publications included conversations between biologists, economists, and anthropologists cumulatively seeking to understand how forests work and how they could be sustainably managed. 

I went to the Archives to research our history, and in doing so I found some very practical help in meeting my responsibility to maintain accurate records of ForestGEO publications. ForestGEO plot data seeks to capture change over time. The way that we, as an organization, have engaged with data has also changed, and the Archives has helped me to see that. 

Related Collections 

• Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Center for Tropical Forest Science,  Program Records, 1980-2005, Accession 08-097,  Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Center for Tropical Forest Science,  Inside CTFS, 1994-2004, Accession 12-066, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Related Resources 

• “How to Fit a Forest in Five Boxes” by Megan Raby, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives