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Swedish Pepparkakor Tree, 1980. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 11-009: Smithsonian Photographic Services, Photographic Collection, 1971-2006. Image no. 82-547.

Cookie Tree, 1980. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 11-009: Smithsonian Photographic Services, Photographic Collection, 1971-2006. Image no. 80-553.

Swedish Tree, 1980. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 11-009: Smithsonian Photographic Services, Photographic Collection, 1971-2006. Image no. 80-568.

Armenian Tree, 1981. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 11-009: Smithsonian Photographic Services, Photographic Collection, 1971-2006. Image no. 82-545.

Trees of Christmas - Exhibition drawings, 1992. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994.Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994.

Trees of Christmas - Exhibition drawings, 1992. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994.Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994.

Trees of Christmas - Floor plans, 1992. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994.

Trees of Christmas - Floor plans, 1992. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994.

On December 19, 1977 the Trees of Christmas exhibition opened at the National Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History). This was the first exhibition by the Office of Horticulture (now Smithsonian Gardens) and featured trees with handcrafted ornaments representing a variety of countries and cultural traditions.

The exhibition was based on the book Trees of Christmas by Edna Metcalfe and consisted of twelve trees, each eight to twelve-feet tall. There were two trees representing the United States: Pioneer America and Tidewater; three themed trees: Williamsburg, American Victorian, and the U.S. Community Tree; and seven trees representing other countries: Denmark, Ukraine, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Russia, and France.

The Trees of Christmas exhibitions were displayed annually from 1977 to 1992. Over the years, there were close to 100 different trees displayed and thousands of ornaments created. One tree that received many comments was the Action Santa tree, which featured "rosy-cheeked, roly-poly Santas that do everything from playing lacrosse, football, and soccer to posing as a doctor, fireman, or crab trapper" and were "made of salt dough dyed with paint and slowly baked in a warm oven.” Another popular one was the Cookies tree, which was decorated with cookies in a variety of shapes along with cookie cutters. Other trees that gained attention were the Nature's Bounty tree, which was decked out with dried flowers, fruits, cones, and pods, and the Origami Around the World tree, which exhibited origami created by folders from twenty U.S. states and fifteen countries.

Holiday decorations continue to be a tradition at the Smithsonian where trees and poinsettias can be found from the Smithsonian Castle to the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Related Resources

• Tis the Season at the Smithsonian, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Edna Melcalfe, The Trees of Christmas (New York: Abindgton Press, 1969).

Related Collections

• Record Unit 551: National Museum of American History, Department of Exhibits, Exhibition Records, 1957-1992, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Accession 94-035: Office of the Physical Plant, Horticulture Services Division, Office of the Director, Records, 1972-1990, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Accession 96-001: National Museum of American History, Department of Public Programs, Public Program Records, circa 1977-1994,  Smithsonian Institution Archives

Most archival “discovery” stories are bogus, but this one (from the Smithsonian’s Joseph Cornell Study Center) is very, very cool! [via Artnet]

DCistfeatures some of the objects from the Library of Congress's new Rosa Parks exhibit. [via DCist] 

Medieval medical manuscripts depict unrealistically happy patients. [via Onisillos Sekkides]

Smithsonian highlights a new digital portal of testimonies from enslaved Atlantic Africans. [via Smithsonian]

Thanks to a wad of old chewing gum, we now know a little more about the ancient humans who inhabited Scandinavia. [via New York Times]

The National Zoo’s newborn porcupine has been named by public vote! [via Washington Post]

Take a personality quiz to find your place in the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood! [via National Portrait Gallery UK]

Last week, on December 17 and 18, folks from across the Smithsonian and the public gathered to listen, learn, and discuss at "Working Women: The Smithsonian Institution as a Case Study," a two-day symposium, organized by the American Women’s History Initiative. Presenters celebrated women working at the Smithsonian and explored how they represent the broader experience for American women over the last 150 years. With a packed schedule, there’s a lot of ground to cover. If you missed it, don’t worry because I’ve got your recap and highlights from the Archives!

Day One:

The Archives’ own Pamela Henson, institutional historian and Smithsonian employee since 1973, gave the first of three keynote addresses, titled "Women of the Smithsonian: A New View from 1846 to 2019." Henson provided a brief overview of women throughout the history of the institution, from the ways in which women gained employment, or even unpaid work, in the early years of the Smithsonian to the breadth of female leadership today. Henson invited the audience to consider, "Why don’t we know more about these women?" Following her talk, women in leadership from across the institution held a roundtable discussion, "Working Women: Establishing a Legacy of Leadership at the Smithsonian," which included a vibrant exchange between women directors past and present.

Day Two:

We started day two with Kelly Navies, museum specialist in oral history for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, who opened the Wednesday morning sessions with "How Oral History Illuminates the Life and Works of Women at the Smithsonian: The Story of Jeannine Smith Clark." Navies reminded us how oral history is linked to women’s liberation. In the morning sessions, we had another representative from the Archives, photo archivist Marguerite Roby. In her talk, "Setting the Stage: Louisa Bernie Gallaher and Frances Benjamin Johnston," Roby showcased two early women Smithsonian photographers. Through meticulous research, Roby found that Gallaher contributed a vast body of work to the Smithsonian, but, until recently, was largely uncredited. While Gallaher self-identified as a photographer, Roby noted she was labeled as "clerk from the beginning to the end of her career." Stay tuned for more on Roby’s work!

Fath Davis Ruffins, curator at the National Museum of American History, served as the final keynote speaker on Wednesday afternoon with her talk, "Early African Women Museum Professionals, 1970s to 1980s." The latter half of the day also included more exciting panels, including one with Liz Harmon, the American Women’s History Initiative Digital Curator at the Archives. The discussions during Harmon’s panel examined the importance of data and how it can offer a permanent impact to reverse the erasure of women in history. To that end, Harmon shared how she is compiling names of early women Smithsonian employees in science.

And that’s a wrap! Keep up with more work from Henson, Roby, and Harmon and the amazing work on women at the Smithsonian.

Related Resources

• "The Woman Behind the Camera," by Marguerite Roby, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• "Smithsonian Women in Science," by Elizabeth Harmon, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• "Smithsonian Women in Science in the Nineteenth Century," by Elizabeth Harmon, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• "‘Muse of Scientific Literature’: Leila Forbes Clark," by Pamela Henson, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• "Women’s History" tag, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

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:

• Farm machinery transferred to the Smithsonian following the Centennial Exposition
• "Electric Kiss" display in the National Museum of American History
• A hippo bathtub featured in a 1970s Cooper Hewitt exhibit
• Reports of Ferdinand Westdahl
• The Abominable Snowman and Minnesota Iceman
• E.K. Janaki-Ammal’s correspondence with Mary Agnes Chase
• Books donated to the Smithsonian as part of the Adams-Clement Collection

Permissions for upcoming publications using our photos or documents include:

• Image of Samuel F.B. Morse’s daguerreotype equipment for an episode of the Museum of Modern Art’s "Conservation Stories"
• Maria Goeppert Mayer portrait for the National Academy of Sciences’ exhibition "Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine"
• Image of Martha the passenger pigeon for a curriculum kit by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Group portrait of the Smithsonian Women’s Council for the Smithsonian Science Education Center’s upcoming book Art in Science
• Image of Hirshhorn model for an architecture brochure by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
• A list of specimens collected by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque for an upcoming book by Barbara Thiers of the New York Botanical Garden

A Library of Congress collab:

A typical day might include a few questions about the provenance of Smithsonian museum objects. More rare and exciting is the chance to explore the nitty-gritty of other institutions’ collections! A recent question from Joshua Kueh, Southeast Asian reference librarian at the Library of Congress, took us behind the scenes of the Farquhar correspondence collection　in the Library’s Asian Division. The correspondence had been　part of a purchase made by missionary Alfred North on the Wilkes Expedition (1838-1842) and came to the Smithsonian in 1858. But what else had North bought?

Record Unit 7186, the United States Exploring Expedition Collection, held no answers, so Joshua continued to trace back the custodial history of the collection. Prior to its transfer from the Smithsonian to the Library of Congress, and even before it arrived at the Smithsonian, the Farquhar correspondence had been held at the old Patent Office. This was the headquarters of the National Institute, a precursor of the Smithsonian, whose records Joshua next delved into at SIA. "I was really thrilled to find what I was looking for there: the list of books procured by [Alfred] North," Joshua writes. "This list will help establish the provenance of the Malay and Bugis rare book collections in the Asian Division of the LOC and will be key in future digitization projects of material linked to the Wilkes Expedition."

Related Resources

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

Snuggle up and pass the popcorn because the Smithsonian American Art Museum and New-York Historical Society teamed up for a #MuseumHolidayMovies marathon. [via SAAM]

Five climate experts are giving us hope. [via Earth Optimism]

The New York Timesreviews the decade through photographs. [via New York Times]

The National Museum of American History wants all of your opinions about the future of the museum. [via National Museum of American History]

Washingtonian has crowned the eleven "Washingtonians of the Year," including Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. [via Library of Congress]

Whitney Museum visitors can examine the resilience of North American Indigenous people and the abuse by colonizers through an augmented reality app. [via Hyperallergic]

Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum has your hottest new Tuesday night plans— Twilight Tuesdays! [via Melanie Adams]

We’ve had an exciting year at the Archives, filled with new projects and fresh faces. Before we dive into 2020, let’s take a look back at what we accomplished this year.

The Archives welcomed three new additions to our staff. Institutional history division assistant Hannah Byrne, curator with the American Women’s History Initiative Dr. Elizabeth Harmon, and digital imaging technician Jessica Scott have already made the Archives’ collections more accessible to researchers and our digital audiences.

In the 2019 fiscal year, the Archives Division, which comprises of reference and archives information management staff, was busy answering your burning questions, in-person, over the phone, and via email, and processing new collections. If you want to explore exactly what’s new, tune into our quarterly “Collection Highlights” series on the blog. This year, the team:

• Attended to researchers in 777 in-person visits
• Created or revised 835 finding aids to the Archives’ collections
• Accepted 243 new accessions, comprising of 587.34 cubic feetand 34 gigabytes 

As an added bonus from the division, reference archivist Tad Bennicoff became our resident Smokey Bear expert and authored two new webpages on the real-life Smokey Bear, who lived at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo from 1950 to 1976. 

The Institutional History Division continued to collect oral histories from former Smithsonian employees. Staff and interns:

• Added18 oral history interviews in five collections, totaling 25 hours of recordings, to our collections

Additionally, Smithsonian historian Dr. Pamela Henson wrote a new webpage about the career of 14^th Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III.

In the 2019 fiscal year, the Digital Services Division digitized new materials for researchers and added to the Archives’ digital collections by capturing Smithsonian websites, social media, and so much more. Staff:

• Assessed and analyzed 142 collections with born-digital materials
• Absorbed 2.85 terabytes of original source material
• Digitized 18,964 surrogates of documents, diaries, field notes, manuscripts, photographs and audio.

For some divisions, it’s just plain tough to put their contributions into numbers. In Preservation Team highlights, staff undertook a complete rehousing and preservation photocopying for unstable materials in the moderately large collection (103 boxes, 51.69 cu. ft.) from the Office of Under Secretary Records, 1958-1973, Record Unit 137. In a smaller custom job, preservation coordinator Alison Reppert Gerber carved out space within space for a wee object in the Frank A. Taylor Papers, 1835-2003, Accession 18-009. 

Addressing long-term stabilization for problematic acetate films, the team packed 111 films from National Zoological Park. Department of Zoological Research, Animal Research Records, 1954, 1968-2000 Accession 15-268 for long-term frozen storage and moved into our photo storage vault.

Conservation highlights include the transfer and assessment of 1,144 field books, with treatment plans underway.

Additionally, conservator William Bennett wrote about the preliminary stabilizing treatment of a new accession, the Hungerford Deed of Partition, Accession 19-150, which sheds valuable light on the seeds of James Smithson’s fortune, his mother’s family inheritance – and is a fascinating physical object in and of itself.

And how could we forget that time senior conservator Nora Lockshin helped fight crime by examining suspected stolen copies of Christopher Columbus’s letters.

As always, we offer a huge round of applause and our deepest gratitude to our #volunpeers who donate their time and expertise to the Archives by transcribing our collections through the Smithsonian Transcription Center? This year, volunpeers completed 109 projects, totaling 9,592 pages.

Drum roll, please! The 2019 top five blog posts, which range from web archiving to Smithsonian history to conservation, should not be missed. Below are our top five most-viewed blog posts written in 2019.

1. Searching and Using Web Archives, by Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig
Researchers, scholars, and journalists are making use of website and social media archives, and electronic records archivist Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig provided tips about how you can, too! Explore websites the Smithsonian Institution Archives has in our collections.

2. Did That Really Happen? Snake Smashin’, by Emily Niekrasz
It was your average Friday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on April 4, 1969. All was well. That is, until a thirty-one-year-old man pulled a hatchet and butcher knife out of a paper bag and began hacking at displays of taxidermied snakes in the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians. After you read this post, you’ll never take a museum security line for granted again.

3. Gender Discrimination at the Smithsonian Institution, by Clara Kaul
A complete history of the Smithsonian Institution includes stories of employment discrimination. Archives intern Clara Kaul explored the experiences of anthropologist Joanna Cohen Scherer, who filed lawsuits against the Smithsonian to advocate for an end to discrimination in hiring practices. Scherer’s trailblazing changed the lives of female anthropologists both within and outside of the Smithsonian.

4. Fitting Unusual Collections into Standard Boxes, by Alison Reppert Gerber
For archival collections, fitting unusual collections within standard size boxes can be a common occurrence. Preservation coordinator Alison Reppert Gerber gave readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into one of her many rehousing projects, which included a whole lot of  creativity to create custom housing for a small, unique object.

 5. M*A*S*H: Binding Up the Exhibit, by Emily Niekrasz
Thirty-six years ago, “M*A*S*H: Binding Up the Wounds” opened at the National Museum of American History, and the response was overwhelming. In this post, explore the reception to the exhibit and watch a clip of *screams* actor Alan Alda at the donation ceremony in 1983.

Last but not least, pop in those headphones to listen to clips from an oral history of ornithologist Roxie Laybourne in our collections with Smithsonian’s podcast, Sidedoor. 

Cheers to 2019 and we’ll see you soon in 2020!

Happy New Year and Happy 2020!

Love it or hate it, but email is still a big part (of most) of our lives, despite growth among cloud, mobile, and social media platforms for communication in the last ten years. Radicati, a technology market research group, predicted that there will be more than four billion email users in 2020. That’s more than half of the number of people on the planet.

A new year is a great time to think about or even revisit email account practices.

Should all email messages be kept? No! We have an excellent post on weeding email messages in the workplace that is still relevant today. Some of this information also can apply to one’s personal email when it comes to spam or messages that are part of a later thread of messages. Some email clients/software can even help automate some cleanup work depending on the features it offers. For instance email software sometimes can move specific email messages from a sender to a specific folder by applying filters or rules.  

Many archives, libraries, and other institutions realize the significance that email messages and collections offer, and are considering issues and tools for email appraisal, sensitive data and duplicate messages, preservation, and access in a variety of ways.

Good email practices are important to us in the Archives. Email collections can present a wealth of information for researchers on key business decisions, day-to-day operations, and social networks evident in “To” and “From” lines. Using email in research successfully is all dependent on how an email collection is managed by the user over time and, eventually, by a repository. Just like a donor typically should not bequeath a box of grocery store receipts (depending on the collecting mission of the archive, of course), an email collection usually should not have messages retained permanently about donuts in the breakroom or neighborhood listserv announcements about pet sitters. The repository needs to make sure the messages and attachments remain accessible while retaining authenticity and integrity— even it means the messages and attachments are likely to be presented in a format or program that might not be in the software that the email was originally viewed from.

Email collections have the additional complication of possibly containing sensitive data within email messages or attachments such as bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, or other information. Some current email applications, though, can prevent or flag this information before it is sent. 

Some email projects that are exploring these issues:

Some email projects that are exploring these issues:

• The Review, Appraisal, and Triage of Mail (RATOM) is a project at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partnership with State Archives of North Carolina. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a grant to the project, which is exploring open-source tools and procedures to identify email in born-digital collections and to detect sensitive information. It also helps sort out important messages for preservation that can be tagged or labeled for better organization and retrieval.
• PDF as an Archival Container for Email is a project, also funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that is determining the requirements needed if emails are preserved as PDFs. A requirements draft is expected to be released in early 2020 for public comment. This work can help standardize the use of PDF as another option for the preservation and accessibility of email messages/collections.

(Full disclosure – The author is involved with both projects, serving on the advisory board for the RATOM project and as a collaborator for the PDF email project)

• ePADD– This open-source tool/project from Stanford Libraries offers a potential donor/email holder the ability to sort and decide which emails they might want to donate to a repository through an export function.  An archive also can use ePADD to search email for sensitive information like Social Security numbers as well as filter by certain correspondents. A researcher can use ePADD for viewing a collection of email messages since its interface is very user friendly.

• DArcMail Suite - This open-source application was developed by the Smithsonian Institution Archives for its processing, review, access, and preservation work with email collections. It creates XML-preservation files of email accounts and offers basic searching and sorting and browsing within email collections. Work also has started on searching for sensitive information.

While there is general agreement in some areas of digital preservation among practitioners (uncompressed broadcast WAV for audio and PDF/A or PDF for proprietary word-processing documents), there is no one best solution for processing, preserving, and making email collections accessible. More options are being developed since the early-to-mid-2000s when work was just starting. An archive/library needs to explore its systems and workflows that might already be in place to determine which email tools and procedures to adopt.

Related Resources

• A Report from the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives, August 2018
• “Together We Can Meet the Email Preservation and Access Challenge,” by Ricc Ferrante, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• “Yes, We’re Still Talking About Email,” by Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• “You’ve Still Got Mail,” by Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Better late than never. Happy New Year, public-domain works from 1924! [via Smithsonian]

Kevin Bacon is so 2019—check out the Bancroft Library’s 6 Degrees of Mark Twain instead. [via infoDOCKET]

This illustrated book about the underworld is so circa 2000 BC. [via New York Times]

Athena the baby sloth has arrived at the National Zoo! [via DCist]

Spend the night with Edward Hopper paintings in Richmond. [via Future of Museums]

The little brown bat may become the official mammal of the District of Columbia. [via Chesapeake Bay Foundation]

Artist Simon Beck offers inspiration for your next snow day. [via Hyperallergic]

Life for a working woman after World War I was a mixed bag. As Smithsonian historian Pamela M. Henson explained at the first annual Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative symposium, several young women secured clerical jobs in Washington, D.C. as a result of the conflict. However, with the onset of the Great Depression, hiring stagnated across the city, promotions were scarce, and the Economy Act of 1932 spelled the end of many women’s federal careers as, per section 213, they were laid off if their husbands also worked for the government.

On top of these struggles, working women between the wars faced the constant challenge of unequal pay and recognition. Yet, those who maintained their positions through the country’s worst economic slump often began long, fruitful careers that are increasingly being recognized by historians and the public. I unearthed the stories of two such women who corresponded via letters type-written at their respective desks in Washington, D.C. and New York.

Together, Ruth B. MacManus and Gertrude Brown worked long and hard on a product that does not bear their names: the Smithsonian Scientific Series.

Beginning in the late 1920s, the Smithsonian partnered with a for-profit publishing company to sell a twelve-volume set of books “to diffuse knowledge more widely” and “supplement its own inadequate resources for the increase of knowledge.” Each volume showcased a topic studied at the Smithsonian, such as insects or American inventions, and communicated information to readers in easy-to-understand prose. While the Smithsonian’s staff fully supported the educational content of the Smithsonian Scientific Series, the New-York-based publication company in charge of printing and selling the books frequently fell short of their standards. Typographical errors spilled across pages and salesmen used misleading, high-powered techniques to secure subscribers.

The Smithsonian received hundreds of letters from Americans pointing out mistakes and criticizing the sale of the series. Ruth MacManus, who worked as an assistant in the Smithsonian’s Editorial Division, communicated their concerns to the publication company and facilitated corrections dictated by the series’ chief editors: Webster P. True and Charles G. Abbot. As secretary to the company’s president, Gertrude Brown received MacManus’s letters in New York and informed the staff of any necessary changes.

MacManus and Brown bonded over their heavy workloads and shared experiences as working women. In November 1934, Brown broke her purely-professional writing style to relay to MacManus the challenge of overseeing numerous editorial changes as a female secretary: “You see, I am just another one of the girls in the office, and it is a little difficult for me to make frequent criticisms.” MacManus responded with kindness and support, assuring Brown, “I can understand perfectly the difficulty of your position, for I have been in the same situation myself.” MacManus ended her letter by asking Brown not to “worry if something goes wrong once in a while. That is to be expected. It isn’t humanly possible for anyone to turn out work that is 100% perfect all the time.”

After this exchange, both women increasingly wove candid discussions of their jobs and information about their personal lives into their everyday business correspondence. Requests for meetings and additional rounds of edits appeared side-by-side with well-wishes, movie recommendations, and tales of long-distance boyfriends. As years passed, they exchanged anecdotes from tipsy holiday parties and New Year’s Eve celebrations. On one such occasion, MacManus admitted to Brown how “wonderful…a little of the old fire water lifts your spirits and downs your inhibitions. I could conquer the world if I could have just a slight glow all the time.” Both women also regularly remarked on their inadequate pay and instances when they took on the load of two jobs in lieu of delayed staff replacements.

Despite the frequency of their letters, the robust friendship between Brown and MacManus never distracted from their duties; their bosses’ letters frequently acknowledge the dependability and respect they had in their workplace.

While little is known about Brown beyond what she shared with her D.C. pen pal, MacManus’s obituary is filed in the Smithsonian Institution Archives. It recounts thirty-five years of service to the Smithsonian’s editorial and publications division: “At the time of her death” MacManus “served as publications editor” and “was responsible for the publication of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, the annual reports of the Smithsonian and the publications of the Freer Gallery of Art.” Her name and Brown’s are absent from the pages of the Smithsonian Scientific Series. However, it is clear from their Depression-Era correspondence and the letters of their peers how invaluable both women were to the books’ publications. In keeping with themes from the Smithsonian’s recent symposium, the heartfelt words in Brown and MacManus’s letters also reveal challenges that women continue to face in the workplace and the value of peer-to-peer encouragement.

Related Resources

• Smithsonian Scientific Series, 1924-1948, Record Unit 611
• Smithsonian Institution Biographical Information File, Record Unit 7098
• Volumes of the Smithsonian Scientific Series are available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The first volume (quoted below) is The Smithsonian Institution by Webster P. True.

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 Revised or New Finding Aids Online, including:

• Accession 19-001 - Ursula B. Marvin Papers, c. 1928-2012. This collection documents planetary geologist Ursula Marvin's professional career and personal life. Materials include correspondence with friends, family and colleagues; biographical information about Marvin; detailed dairy-like journals of her work and travels; and photographs and slides of her family, work, lectures, and travels. Of special note are journals detailing her trips to Antarctica, and family correspondence describing her activities while in Brazil and Angola.

Nine Finding Aids with New Links to Digitized Material, including:

• Record Unit 9513 - Lucile Quarry Mann Oral History Interviews, 1977. These interviews of Lucile Mann cover her education; editorial and administrative careers with the Bureau of Entomology and the National Zoological Park (NZP); life as wife of the NZP Director, William M. Mann; travels and expeditions for the zoo; animals raised in their home; famous residents of the Zoo; and reminiscences about famous scholars and personalities such as Austin H. Clark, Leonhard Stejneger, Noel Coward, and Alexander Woollcott. The full transcripts of these interviews are now available via the finding aid.
• Record Unit 9587 - Helena M. Weiss Oral History Interviews, 1987. These interviews of Weiss discuss her work at the Veterans Administration and career at the Smithsonian, including her work as a stenographer for the Office of Correspondence and Documents and secretary for the Department of Geology, tenure as Registrar for the United States National Museum, and role as one of the first women managers at the Smithsonian. Also included are reminiscences of many colleagues, notably Ray S. Bassler, Herbert S. Bryant, Louise M. Pearson, and Alexander Wetmore, and stories about her responsibilities for important artifacts and specimens. The full transcripts of these interviews are now available via the finding aid.

Related Resources

• Collection Highlights, October 2019, by Tammy Peters, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• 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

In the name of science, cuttlefish are at the vanguard of eyeglass fashion. [via Science Friday]

ZORA Magazine has published the ZORA Canon, a top 100 list of books authored by African American women. [via ZORA]

The city of Alexandria will revitalize Old Town’s Freedom House museum. [via DCist]

A depiction of the Joseph Henry statue engrossed in a book is one of the highlights of a forthcoming graphic novel series inspired by the Smithsonian. [via New York Times]

An upcoming Hirshhorn exhibition will bring back the Kusama craze! [via Washington Post]

A cartoonist at the Musee D’Orsay imagines Instagram posts from 19th-century artists. [via The Art Newspaper]

Recently, I was reviewing the Archives’ earliest accessions of born digital records and made some unexpected connections, beginning with the software that was part of “ZooArk,” an exhibit that traveled the country between 1988 and 1990 with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). The exhibit included video games that encouraged visitors to play matchmaker for white, black and Asian rhinos. Additionally, a computerized quiz game educated the public about the challenges and resources required to care for tigers. As a whole, “ZooArk” demonstrated how zoos were collaborating and working together to protect endangered species.

Examining those early game files reminded me again how fragile our digital history is and how these unique objects show up in the middle of some intriguing and important debates about animal reproduction and captivity.

In 1995, the Archives accessioned forty storage boxes of exhibition records from SITES, spanning its work between 1979 and 1995. Among the scripts and photographs, videotapes, slides and moving image material, were four 5.25” floppy disks containing files from “ZooArk’s” rhino and tiger games, as well as a floppy disk from another SITES exhibit, Exploring The Planets. As soon as its initial processing was completed, the Archives placed the accession in archival storage. The files on those floppy disks were not quite ten years old, and this was only the seventh accession of identified digital material in our collections. At this point, the Archives’ dedicated digital preservation program was still eight years away.

The fragility of digital history

As the Archives’ Electronic Records Program began to ramp up in the mid-2000s, a thorough inventory of its digital holdings was followed by risk assessments. The “ZooArk” disks were readable and the files, now twenty years old, had survived, intact. The Archives employed a bit-level preservation strategy to protect the files’ integrity. In short, the risk of file degradation had been avoided.

However, two other factors currently prevent researchers from exploring the games. 

Only four files from the rhino game had been on the floppy disks transferred to the Archives in 1995, though the tiger game appeared complete. Another digital preservation risk factor that has negatively impacted access to the games is hardware obsolescence. The tiger game can be started on the now-obsolete Windows XP operating system, but the game controller that enabled you to interact with it had not accompanied the records. Perhaps finding a way to emulate the old environment and its hardware using today’s computers might prove successful. There’s hope yet.

Tell me more – Zoos as MatchMakers or Arks

To learn more, I took to the internet with surprising results. Chicago Tribune Reporter Steve Dale had written about the exhibit when it was hosted at the Chicago Zoo in the fall of 1988. He described the rhino game as something patterned after the television show, The Dating Game. Dale wrote:

You won`t find this video game at local bars or clubs. The whole idea is to show how zoos from all over the world link up by computer in a system called the International Species Information System. It`s a ''dating service'' to determine the best match for members of endangered species. This way, zoos don`t have to take more wild stock.

Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2017), suggests a connection between the “ZooArk” game and Great Expectations, one of the first video-dating companies in the United States.

Their observations pointed to a more compelling point–this idea that zoos serve as protectors of biodiversity and positive agents in the case of endangered species through breeding programs. Like in the story of Noah’s Ark, the matchmaking game represents the idea that zoos function as safe spaces that protect and support endangered species when their natural habitats are shrinking.

The trail of clues leads where?

At the time of the “ZooArk” exhibition at the Chicago Zoo in 1988, several zoos were already working together to reintroduce golden lion tamarins to their native rain forest habitat in Brazil, coordinated through the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. Hmmm. The National Zoo. Golden lion tamarins. These monkeys happened to be a focus of Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park’s Dr. Devra Kleiman (1942-2010), and the Archives holds archival records about the topic. And, so, I find myself back in the Archives reading room eager to see how this concept of zoos as wildlife ‘arks’ plays out in the real world case of the golden lion tamarin. Vince Sodaro, a Brookfield Zoo expert in South American monkeys, in summed this ideas up nicely to Chicago Tribune reporter Laurie Goering in 1997. He noted: 

About half the estimated 1,000 golden lion tamarins alive are in captivity because of zoo breeding programs, and building up the genetic diversity of the wild population is a priority. More than 140 zoo-raised golden lion tamarins have been released in the wild in Rio state, all through an international committee organized at Washington's National Zoo.

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Devra Kleiman and Benjamin Beck observe while a golden lion tamarin practices foraging, 1983, by Jessie Cohen, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image no. SIA-SIA16-065_B31_F03_S02_06.

Dr. Devra Kleiman with Golden Lion Tamarin, July 1, 1985, by Jessie Cohen. Courtesy of Smithsonian's National Zoological Park, Image no. NZP-6076-48JC.

Related Collections

• Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Exhibition Records, circa 1979-1995, Accession 95-161 Smithsonian Institution Archives
• National Zoological Park, Dept. of Zoological Research, Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program Records, 1969-2002, Accession 11-217, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Devra G. Kleiman Papers, 1967-2010, Accession 11-124, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Related Resources 

• "ZooArk Has Date for the Endangered," by Steve Dale, Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1988.  
• "Happy Ending to Monkey Tale," by Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1997. 
• The Bigger Picture,golden lion tamarin search