As an intern at the Archives, I have spent a good portion of this summer with headphones over my ears, listening to other people’s conversations. It's work-related, though. I promise.

What I have really been doing is listening to interviews from the Archives' Oral History Collection. Oral history, though subject to certain technicalities, is essentially what it sounds like: information of historical significance that is received orally through a recorded interview. Interviewers march out into the world, armed with recorders to interview subjects on their experiences, and archivists — or in this case, I — then process the recording and the transcript so that researchers can access the imparted information. My entry into this operation is most often at the stage of listening to the recording, where I check it against the transcript that I have received, and edit the transcript as necessary. Hence the headphones. Yet, while on first glance this task may seem rather passive and simple, it is at this stage that I often come up against the most difficult questions in my processing work. 

The transcript is a hybrid document, taking the spoken word of the interview and representing it in written form. Yet, as any linguist will tell you, how we speak is very different from how we write. If someone were to create an exact transcript of my speech, it would be full of "um's" and "like's" and long, awkward pauses. More significantly, I rarely speak using complete, grammatical sentences, apparently preferring to use sentence fragments and run-on sentences. It’s not just me, though. I have found that often, even those who seem incredibly articulate in their recordings have speech that is very difficult to convey in grammatical — or even readable — written sentences in the transcript.

So, as the editor of the transcript, what do I do? It is my job to convey the essence of the interview and of the interviewee as clearly and completely as possible — but the question, I suppose, is what is this essence? I could edit the transcript to be perfectly grammatically correct and effortlessly readable, but in doing so, would I be editing out the flowing, trembling, stuttering humanity of the interviewee whose knowledge and wisdom seems much messier and grander than standard written English can convey? Or, if I kept these moments that our reading eyes judge as mistakes, would I be falsely presenting the speakers as uneducated or inarticulate, and misleading future researchers who study the transcript?

What about accents and dialect? Is representing them faithfully through phonetic spellings or by word order a way of preserving the voice and essence of the speaker and more than that, of affirming him or her? — Or does it make the speaker seem quaint and dismissible? Even more so, what about accents and dialects that have historically been marginalizing? As a literature student and a writer, I have had to grapple with these questions in my own reading and writing, but now, dealing with the speech of real people in real society, the stakes become much higher. Each choice becomes political, and each choice becomes personal. 

Perhaps this is a good thing, though. I have yet to come to a balance in editing that I am fully satisfied with, and from what I read, neither has the discipline of oral history as a whole. Yet, somehow, it seems fitting that this medium of history and the process of producing it mirrors the delicate intertwining of historical knowledge and historical events with human experience and the human soul. I am grateful that my job does not allow me to forget this intertwining, and I hope that my transcripts do the same for the researchers who will study them.

Related Collections

• Record Unit 9622 - National Museum of Natural History, Oral history Interviews, 2009-2011, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Related Resources

• A Photographer's Passion - An Interview with the Late Chip Clark, video, National Museum of Natural History

Have you ever noticed that the Smithsonian was mentioned in a novel, TV series or film?  Do you have a favorite book about the Smithsonian?  Are you partial to The Simpsons couch gags about the Smithsonian?  Are Smithsonian forensic anthropologists really like Bones?  What actually happens in Smithsonian museums when the public leaves, the curators finally go home, and the collections have the museums to themselves?  Did that curator really commit the murder in the conservation lab with the acid-free cloth tape? 

We’ve been looking at how the Smithsonian, with its museums full of specimens and research labs full of scientists, is portrayed by popular media such as movies, television and books. Public perceptions of museums and researchers can be very different from how Smithsonian staff think about themselves.  Over the years, Smithsonian staff have been portrayed in mysteries, romances, dramas, comedies, and science fiction.  What does this tell us about what the public thinks goes on behind the scenes?  Spy novels have their protagonists disappear into the dark halls at the Natural History Museum.  Movies portray secret collection storage areas under the National Mall.  How have these ideas about the Smithsonian developed and changed over time?  

The Smithsonian Institution, perhaps more than any other museum, has been the setting for fiction writing ranging from work by Gore Vidal to the TV series Bones to films including Night at the Museum.  Its buildings, iconic American landmarks, often set the scene for books, television and films, while characters with ties to the Smithsonian appear in many genres. There are some subtle differences in the portrayal of science, art, anthropology, and history.  But, anthropology has been perhaps the most popular topic for fiction writers. On our new website The Smithsonian in Popular Culture you can explore the different novels, episodes and movies that involve the Insituttion. You can even ask, the question, "Did the Curator Really Do It?" and discover how popular writers construct the characters of museum workers and research scientists and what they think of the Smithsonian's world.

What is your favorite book, TV program or film about the Smithsonian? We would like to continue to expand the website and are looking for input from you.  We invite you to send information about your favorite program or book, movie or film to us at SIHistory@si.edu, or leave a comment below. 

Related Resources

• The Smithsonian in Popular Culture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

• This past week the Nationa Postal Museum celebrated its 20th Anniversary. [via Pushing the Envelope, NPM]
• Out and about this weekend?  If you happen to be in Winchester, Virginia stop by the Cat Tail Run School for Bookbinding Arts to learn about how books are made and how to preserve them. [via Washington Post]
• The Library of Congress holds many rare books, of particular interest to some may be Otieno, by Barack H. Obama, President Obama's father. [via Library of Congress blog]
• The Wikipedia edit-a-thons continue, this one was at the Smithsonia American Art Museum. [via The New York Times]
• This past week the National Archives released the 2012 Records Management Self-Assessment (4th annual) report which presents the results of the annual records management self-assessment (RMSA) taken by Federal agencies. [via InfoDocket]
• A couple of projects work checking out: Chicago Collections Consortium and Exploring the Vilnius Ghetto: A Digital Monument. [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig and Jennifer Wright]
• Not just a car guy, Chris Wilson at the National Museum of American History, shares about a lesser known side of Henry Ford. [via O Say Can You See?, NMAH]
• Staff at the National Zoological Park are on watch as female giant panda Mei Xiang may be pregnant. [via National Zoological Park]

Next week, I'll be participating in a session called "The Web of Sites: Creating Effective Web Archiving Appraisal and Collection Development Policies" at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting.  For those of you who won't be there, I thought it might be a good time to provide an update on the Smithsonian Institution Archives web archiving activities.

In a blog post earlier this year, I announced that the Archives had begun using a subscription service, Archive-It, to preserve the Smithsonian's web presence.  We had previously been using our own installation of the Heritrix software, also used by Archive-It, to crawl and store websites locally.  With the move to Archive-It, we hoped to more efficiently crawl websites, as well as to provide better access to the crawled websites.

How are we doing?  Of the 365 websites and blogs currently being maintained by the Smithsonian, the Archives has crawled 120, or approximately one-third, in the 10 months since we began using Archive-It in October 2012.  This is still far from our goal of crawling each of our websites every year, but is still a significant improvement.  In the two and a half years during which we were using our local installation of Heritrix, we only crawled about one-half of our websites.  We are optimistic that our numbers will continue to improve.  With more experience, we expect that we will become more efficient at setting up, troubleshooting, and reviewing crawls.

As for providing better access to crawled websites, 107 crawled websites and blogs (89 percent of those crawled using Archive-It) are now available online.  More will be available as the review process is completed.   Earlier crawls performed in-house are only available via a few local computers.  We're very happy with this improvement.

Please check out our progress!

Related Resources

• Smithsonian Now Using Archive-It to Crawl Websites, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Smithsonian Institution Collections on Archive-It, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Related Collections

• Website finding aids, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Shark attacks on the increase! Any time this headline flashes it instills fear in the hearts of swimmers and beachgoers everywhere.  Have you ever wondered how we know how many times sharks have attacked humans and where that data has been compiled?  Well, at the Smithsonian of course, where we do just about everything!

In 1958, Smithsonian ichthyologist Leonard P. Schultz and Cornell University professor Perry W. Gilbert established the Shark Research Panel to track reports of shark attacks and search for an effective shark repellant.  The Shark Research File was maintained at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) during its first decade and then transferred to the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, which Gilbert then headed.

World War II, especially the Pacific Theater, had stimulated a great deal of interest in sharks and shark attacks.  Military personnel left adrift reported numerous attacks by sharks while awaiting rescue – if they were lucky enough to survive.  The US Navy provided sailors with a product called "Shark Chaser," a purplish dye that would confuse sharks when spread out in the water, and that provided some protection for a few hours.  On April 8-11, 1958, thirty-four participants met for a conference on sharks at Tulane University in New Orleans.  Following that meeting, with support from the Office of Naval Research and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Gilbert and Schultz created the Shark Research Panel on June 25.

Schultz maintained the shark attack file at the NMNH from 1958 until his retirement in 1968, compiling information about each shark attack and following up with additional questions.  When a shark attack was reported, a physician or scientist in the area was immediately asked to obtain documentation on the attack by submitting a two-page form with questions such as location, environmental conditions, kind of shark, nature and treatment of wounds, and type of activity the victim was engaged in at the time of the attack.  

For the first year, 1959, they compiled information on 36 attacks where sharks made physical contact with victims and analyzed the circumstances.  They also offered advice, noting that sharks usually circle their victim before an aggressive attack, giving the swimmer time to get back to their boat or shore.  They urged calm, since frenzied motion was more likely to attract sharks.  They also noted that it was far more likely a person would be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark, but acknowledged that shark attack victims often bled to death before they could be rescued.

I conducted an oral history interview with Dr. Leonard Schultz in 1976, the year after Jaws hit the theaters, and we discussed his role in shark attack research.  Schultz was pleased that more people were aware of the potential for shark attacks but concerned over the sensationalism the film provoked. He was also concerned about the negative image of sharks the movie created.  Click on the link below to hear Dr. Schultz talk about creation of the shark attack research project.

With Shark Week taking over your television, you probably won’t remain calm or need shark repellant, but if you head to the beach or out on a fishing boat, remember their advice so you don’t become another shark attack file statistic! 

Related Resources

• Leonard Peter Schultz (1901-1986): Ichthyologist and Field Naturalist, National Museum of Natural History
• Shark Attack File, Smithsonian Encyclopedia
• Ocean Portal:  Sharks & Rays, National Musum of Natural History
• The Shark Attacks That Were the Inspiration for Jaws, Smithsonian Magazine
• Shark Week Song, by Marian Call

Related Collections

• Record Unit 7222 - Leonard Peter Schultz Papers, circa 1915-1970, with related papers from 1899, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Record Unit 9510 - Oral history interview with Leonard Peter Schultz 1976, Smithsonian Institution Archives

• There is mini baby boom at the National Zoo! A female Przewalski's horse — the first to be born via artificial insemination — was born in July and the Sumatran tiger, Damai, gave birth to two cubs on Monday. [via e-Torch, SI]
• The One Week | One Tool team launched Serendip-o-matic, a search tool that takes in any text, such as an article, song lyrics, or a bibliography and then extracts key terms, delivering related results from the collections of the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and Flickr Commons. [via Effie Kapsalis, SIA]
• The power of photographs and their ability to capture singular moments in one's life can't be overstated. Recently Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch asked his Twitter followers to share their photographs of the single best moment in their life. [via PetaPixel]
• Behind the scenes: National Air and Space Museum and Museum Conservation Institute interns get an inside look at how spacesuit gloves are made at the International Latex Corporation Dover. [via AirSpace, NASM]
• As Shark Week winds down, SIA's Courtney Bellizzi reflects on hammerheads and searching for sharks in the Archives. [via Smithsonian Collections Blog]
• In memoriam: Marvin Sadik, former director of the National Portrait Gallery, 1969-1981, passed away this past May in Falmouth, Maine. [via facetoface, NPG]

• Stories told and saved, StoryCorps and digital preservation at the Library of Congress. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation, LOC]

During my time as a pre-program intern within the conservation division of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I have learned a great deal about the preservation of scientific journals, field diaries, and specimen lists, through my work with The Field Book Project.  Over the summer, I have been splitting my time between preparing various field books for digitization and surveying the collection of field books to see what treatments are needed. Through these activities, I have discovered many unique materials and have had the opportunity to treat some of them.

One such item is a diary of Leonhard Stejneger from July 26–November 26, 1901, written while he was traveling in Germany. When I first examined the volume, I found seventeen items in ten different locations loosely inserted within the book. The inserts are interesting because they provide a look at everyday life in Germany in the early 20th century.

This lovely little poem found next to the page dated April 1st, 1901 is a clipping from a magazine whose last two lines are cut off.  Curious as to how the poem ends I googled the text of the poem and found it! Here is the link to the full poem To a Tortoise, though I warn you it has a startlingly dark ending and I prefer it in the version found in the diary.

Other inserts, such as these two restaurant tickets, are especially fragile because they are connected along a perforated edge that has survived over 100 years! To ensure their long term preservation I placed them in a Mylar L-sleeve. Each of these tickets allowed one person to enter the restaurant. If you did not have a ticket you could not get in!

A wine label for the wine EST EST EST VERO VINO DI MONTEFIASCONE, found next to the page dated November 2nd, 1901, is a wonderful little piece of artwork, with a great story to boot! The story goes that Johannes Defuk, a bishop following King Henry V of Germany to Rome in 1111, really liked wine. On their way to Rome, Defuk sent his butler ahead of him to find good wines in the villages along the way. If the wine was good he left the message "Est." If it were very good he left the message "Est, Est." But when he came to Montefiascone the wine was so good he left the message "EST! EST! EST!." Johannes Defuk settled in Montefiascone until his death in 1113 leaving a large sum of money to the city with the only stipulation that every year on the day of his death they pour a barrel of wine over his grave. This tradition kept up until the 18th century when they city began giving the barrel of wine to the local priests instead. (Please note that this means they poured a barrel of wine on his grave every year for centuries!)

Lastly, I wanted to share with you a shipping receipt found inside the back cover that had to be flattened and mended. The receipt is for a manuscript and photographs that Leonhard Stejneger shipped to Richard Rathbun, assistant secretary at the Smithsonian.

While this treatment represents only one example over the course of my internship, I have come across and conserved many items  for the Field Book Project that are equally as diverse as this one.  If you are ever in the need for something interesting to study, I highly recommend the Smithsonian's field books as a great place to start!

Related Collections

• Record Unit 7074 - Leonhard Stejneger Papers, 1753, 1867-1943, Smithsonian Institution Archives

In conjunction with the Archives'"Women in Science Wednesday" series, one of my responsibilities this summer was to make sure that women featured on the Archives' Facebook page were also represented on Wikipedia, either through beefing up existing wiki pages or creating pages from scratch. Often times, women in our Science Service collection (Accession 90-105) are only identified on the web and on Wikipedia by name and notable accomplishments, and that's it. (Some exceptions include writer Betty Freiden and pilot Jacqueline Cochran who already have pretty extensive wiki pages.)

For example, Josephine G. Fountain was the inventor – the inventor! – of the direct suction tracheotomy tube and holds it patent – its patent! – yet there is no mention of her on the tracheotomy tube's wiki page nor is there any substantial information on Fountain through a basic internet search (including her background or birthdate). What happened to make Fountain’s accomplishments basically disappear – especially since the trach tube is something used in hospitals every day?

Frederica de Laguna, on the other hand, was much easier to research. Although she is identified in the photograph on the left and featured on collaborator Kaj Birket-Smith's wiki, her own page wasn't linked from it - and was so under-promoted that I actually created a new page before realizing a page already existed. Why does information for de Laguna exist where none does for Fountain and other female scientists like Jane Blankenship, Kathleen Beyer, or Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks? Both de Laguna and Brooks published. Brooks discovered the antidote to carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning; like Fountain, she's responsible for something still in use today. Beyer discovered that plants contain sex chromosomes. And Blankenship was a spectroscopist in an era when women in science was rare. All of these accomplishments are notable and interesting – but these women are almost totally absent from the web.

While I found my (lack of) online discoveries incredibly disappointing, there were also a few cases when doing a simple web search actually did prove beneficial. A previous Archives intern, Mary Tressider, made a webpage on five women in science – Jane Stafford, Marjorie Van de Water, Frances Densmore, Emma Reh, and Marjorie MacDill Breit – which helped me add invaluable information to the wikis of both Stafford and Reh. Also, searching for Mary Blade led me to two unlikely sources: a tumblr entry by Blade's grand nephew and a design blog, both of which featured posts on Blade's involvement with a 1978 book on chair design and ergodynamics – and included some great pictures of Blade posing!

Although it's not surprising that wiki pages sometimes don't exist for science professionals (or else don't expound on one's professional career), it's still more common for women science professionals to suffer these consequences over men doing the same work. Part of the need for (and appeal of) the Archives' "Women in Science" campaign is to highlight the many varied and fascinating accomplishments women make to scientific disciplines. And the beauty of the web (especially a website like Wikipedia that is explicitly reliant on user-generated content) is that it allows anyone the ability to contribute information and ensure these great women get the same exposure and recognition on social communities as their male counterparts

Related Resources

• Meet Sarah Stierch: The Archives’ Wikipedian in Residence, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Women and Science at Science Service, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Related Collections

• Accession 90-105 - Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Over 50 years ago, a team of over 40 Smithsonian researchers were deployed to survey plants and animals living on the islands and atolls of the Pacific Ocean as part of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program. The major goals of the program were to learn what plants and animals occurred on the islands, the seasonal variations in their numbers and reproductive activities, and the distribution and population of the pelagic birds (birds living over the open ocean) of that area.

During the six and a half years of field work, 1,800,000 birds were banded and approximately 150,000 observations of pelagic birds at sea were made. We hope you enjoy these completely adorable pelagic chicks, all in the name of science!

Related Collections

• Record Unit 245 - National Museum of Natural History, Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program, records, circa 1961-1973, with data from 1923

During my summer working on the field book project with the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I was able to go behind-the-scenes at the National Museum of Natural History to help survey collections in the Divisions of Birds, Mammals, and Fishes; and the Departments of Entomology and Botany.  While surveying, we briefly assessed the condition of each book to obtain a rough idea of the condition of the objects and to make an estimate of how long they will take to treat.  I particularly enjoyed surveying, because the field books are full of surprises, and we never knew what drawings, specimens, or photographs we might encounter.  In the Division of Mammals field book collection, I came across a mysterious drawing of a "beaver corral" in one of Vernon Orlando Bailey’s many field books, and was inspired to learn more about Bailey while repairing this book.

The "beaver corral" drawing is one of only a handful in this book, and provides an important record of Bailey's work.  As was mentioned in a blog post by cataloging intern Jenny Mathias, Bailey was a pioneer in the creation and use of humane animal traps, which were designed to catch animals alive and uninjured.  Bailey even received prizes from the American Humane Association for his traps, and published literature related to beavers, including Beaver Habitat and Experiments in Beaver Culture and Ways of the Beaver People.   However, this particular beaver trap was not made for research purposes, but was instead built for a "Mr. Adams" who was interested in selling the beavers to "ranchmen" for stocking streams at a price of $50 for a single beaver or $100 a pair.

In his career, Bailey traveled throughout the United States, mainly researching small mammals, and was often accompanied by his wife, Florence Merriam Bailey, who was a renowned ornithologist.  This particular field book chronicles his adventures in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas from August 1906 to November 1906.  Bailey not only includes notes related to his research, but also provides a detailed account of the vegetation, weather, geographic features, and people he encountered along his journey.  He also mentions his meals, including a supper of "prairie dog & rabbit…& fried owl…& bacon…" and comments that the prairie dog tasted better than the owl!  While in New Mexico, he traveled past numerous mesas and pueblos.  After a particular visit to the Acoma Pueblo which was occupied by a Native American community at the time, he comments that "…it is will only a matter of time till they will come down and leave it." However, Bailey’s prediction thankfully proved to be wrong; Acoma Pueblo remains among the oldest continually occupied pueblo communities.

Many of Bailey’s field books look nearly identical to the one pictured here, and many of them are in a similar state of disrepair; the covers are detached, the leather covering the spine is at least partially lost, and there are a few loose pages.  The leather has also become degraded, and flakes off when the book is handled, which leaves quite a mess.  In order to make this book safe to digitize and handle without causing further damage, I first removed the flaking remains of the leather spine covering, so that I could consolidate the text block with a lining of lightweight Japanese paper and wheat starch paste.  I then reattached the loose pages and stabilized the loose covers with hinges of Japanese paper and wheat starch paste.  It is now housed in a custom-made, polyester cover to prevent further loss of the leather, and is much safer to handle. 

Related Resources

• Texas Natural History: A Century of Change, 2002, by David J. Schmidly
• Mammalogy at the Intersection of Mercy and Truth, Field Book Project blog
• Vernon Orlando Bailey, 2007, by Perry, Bond, and Lohnes. Washington Biologists' Field Club.
• Official Pueblo of Acoma

Related Collections

• Record Unit 7267 - Vernon Orlando Bailey Papers, 1889-1941 and undated, Smithsonian Institution Archives