Women in Science Wednesday: Dora Jean Dougherty Strother
What are You Watching?
The Smithsonian Channel collection of videos that the Smithsonian Institution Archives is preserving is so varied and, at times, so out of the ordinary, that many times per week I’m asked, "What are you watching?" Topics include: the use of insects in forensic science; (too many) airplane crashes that shaped modern-day aviation safety; the real story behind Hollywood blockbuster films, such as The Silence of the Lambs; and, of course, TITANOBOA!, the approximately 2,500-pound Paleocene-era snake discovered in Columbia. . The Smithsonian Channel’s productions draw from the Smithsonian's museums, collections, and professional expertise to explore the history of our planet, life and culture.
A major part of my internship at the Archives involved the preservation of Smithsonian Channel digital content. Though we've received video material from other Smithsonian entities, such as the National Museum of Natural History and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, digital material submitted in obsolete formats will prove a trickier challenge. Starting with the still-playable Smithsonian Channel DVDs is a good test case to develop this new workflow.
It’s been a unique opportunity to participate in the praxis, or ideas becoming practice, necessary to preserving and making accessible the wealth of digital materials people are generating. With the proliferation of smartphones and the means to share video through such venues as YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, or Snapchat, there has been an explosion in the amount of content to watch, but also an increase in the number of video formats that archives need to manage and preserve. Not an easy task for sure, but the Archives has been tackling the problems associated with digital video for quite some time now.
At the start of the summer, I had one personal archival project on my to-do list: organize and sort the many Spotify playlists I amassed but didn't alphabetize when I was busy with coursework. However, if we add VHS and digital recording to the mix, I'll return home with a new digital archives preservation agenda. Personal archiving methods are a super-hot topic right now, so the most important thing that I’ve learned about preserving video from my time here at the Archives is the importance of collaboration in the form of open-source software development. Cultural heritage organizations, such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives, and academic institutions are developing programs collaboratively, as well as relying on users for feedback and/or improvements to the software. For example, a consortium of Illinois universities developed a project, "Preserving (Digital) Objects with Restricted Resources," to suggest sustainable digital preservation solutions. The outcome was a directory of preservation tools—a mix of open source and commercial—recommended by the preservation community.
It's been great to see how the digital preservation community rises to the challenge of creating software programs that pay attention to preservation needs. Have you ever tried to simply copy an audio or video file from one location to another, but found that the video won't play? Preserving all the files that accompany a video are key to making sure the video plays properly. The Library of Congress' creation of the BagIt specification helps solve this problem by creating a "bag" that captures and contains all the related elements of a transferred video file. Being able to "bag" a set of files ensures full file transfer and future playability with the right tools.
What we've found with developing a workflow for the Smithsonian Channel programs is that no one tool covers all of the necessary steps for preserving video. Some of the steps include ingesting or transferring of the video for preservation work, running a checksum, bulk renaming the files to follow standards, and embedding metadata.
In assessing your video preservation needs, have a look around at some of the digital preservation tools available, bearing in mind that some are recommended for institutional use. Jumping in and spending hundreds of dollars for fancy software that doesn't always do what it says on the package isn't something that institutions can afford to do and, likely, neither can you.
I'm returning to my archives program with a new sense of the cooperation and flexibility required to create from scratch a process for keeping up with our evolving digital preservation needs. And, thanks to the Smithsonian Channel's vivid creations, I now have a reservoir of weird and wonderful information for a winning bar trivia strategy.
Related Resources
- Digital Video Preservation: Identifying Containers and Codecs, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Digital Video Preservation: Further Challenges for Preserving Digital Video and Beyond, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Digital Video Preservation: Continuing the Conversation, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Smithsonian Channel on YouTube
Related Collections
- Accession 12-610, Smithsonian Channel, Productions, 2011, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Link Love: 8/23/2013
- For your use: a new guide to archiving digital video. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation, LOC]
- An interesting intersection between artists, museums, and digital records: The XFR STN at the New Museum will be used to preserve audiovisual materials from the New Museum’s archive as well as be open for use by any artist to preserve their moving image or born-digital materials whose formats have become obsolete. [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]
- Just a little stale: Folks at the National Museum of American History open up a can of fortune cookies from the 1930s for the first time. [via O Say Can You See?, NMAH]
- The Smithsonian's Transcription Center is continuing to evolve and engage with users in order to make collections more accessible. [via Smithsonian Collections Blog, SI]
- The Smithsonian American Art Museum recently acquired 100 photographs by legendary photographer Irving Penn. [via The Torch, SI]
- Free for use: The Getty has just made available 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum's collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose. [via InfoDocket]
- Out of this world: NASA's efforts to digitize lunar film are hightlighted in this video. [via PetaPixel]
See Here: 8/23/2013
Sneak Peek 8/26/2013

Calling All First Ladies
Imagine: It's 1809 and you are tasked with traveling by carriage across unpaved city streets to deliver correspondence to society’s elites. Are you a courier? Or a page? Perhaps, but you might also be the First Lady! Social historian Barbara Carson explains the varied social duties that 19th - century First Ladies were expected to fulfill in an interview conducted by Smithsonian Productions and now found in the Smithsonian Institution Archives'Accession 03-059 - Smithsonian Productions, Productions, 1987-2001.
In the era before telephones, people delivered calling cards to initiate contact with new acquaintances or to express an intention to meet with someone in the future. Calling cards were especially prevalent at the United States Capitol, where the turnover of congressmen, foreign ministers, and other government officials required a constant stream of new introductions. As the official hostess of the White House, the First Lady had a social obligation to pay calls to new wives, resulting in long and tiresome carriage rides around Washington to deliver calling cards fifteen to thirty times a day.
Dolley Madison, known as one of the White House’s most charming official hostesses, dutifully met this obligation. Her successor, however, broke with calling card tradition by refusing to deliver calling cards. At the time of Elizabeth Monroe’s entry to the White House in 1817, Washington society was rapidly expanding and the ritual of making first calls had become unreasonably demanding. President James Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, addressed the necessary change in social protocol by issuing a statement to explain that the First Lady would no longer make first calls. Though Elizabeth Monroe was relieved of this one social burden, she continued to work diligently as a hostess and is credited with bringing European influence to White House state dinners.
Listen to the clip below to hear Barbara Carson’s discussion of calling cards.
The social obligations of the First Lady have continued to evolve throughout each presidency. Modern First Ladies are expected to wear many hats during their residence in the White House: official hostess, fashion icon, policy advocate, and campaigner are just a few. As a figurehead of the president’s administration, the First Lady is an ongoing object of public fascination.
To learn more see the National Museum of American History's First Ladies exhibition.
As an intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I have contributed to the preservation of this collection by converting the Barbara Carson interview and other audio files from digital audio tapes (DATs) to Broadcast WAV files. DATs resemble the once-popular analog cassette tapes except that they are smaller, measuring roughly 2x3 inches, and are able to record digital audio. Since the advent of compact discs (CDs) and other newer audio formats, DATs have become obsolete.
In the DAT transfer process, short periods of missing audio, known as "drop-outs," are a common problem. A drop-out, like the one that occurs in the above clip at 1:57, is generally caused when existing damage on a DAT prevents the proper transfer of audio. Without the current interventions being taken by the Archives, these tapes would linger in archival boxes and, eventually, the recordings would become inaccessible due to either the deterioration of their magnetic tape or the disappearance of DAT reading equipment.
Related Resources
- Swingin’ and Swayin’ in the Archives, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- The First Ladies at the Smithsonian, online exhibition, National Museum of American History
Related Collections
- Accession 03-059 - Smithsonian Productions, Productions, 1987-2001, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Link Love: 5/17/2019
Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
Conservators at the Library of Congress are smooshing dried bugs to replicate the dyes in early printed books! [via the Library of Congress]
Anthropologist Aida Gómez-Robles recently published a study of Neanderthal teeth; the Smithsonian’s Rick Potts thinks she has “bitten off an interesting topic.” [via Smithsonian]
WAMU profiles“Habitat,” Smithsonian Gardens’ first Smithsonian-wide exhibition that will run until 2021. [via SI Gardens]
Researchers have mapped the “wood wide web” of trees’ mycorrhizal networks. [via BBC]
A beta version of the “Get the Research” search engine aims to make academic scholarship accessible to the general public. [via infoDOCKET]
The O Say Can You See project analyzes and maps the freedom suits brought by enslaved plaintiffs in early Washington, DC. [via Humanities NE]
These kitty cats are in the public domain. [via Lifehacker]

Sneak Peek 5/20/2019
Demolition of roads on the National Mall during conversion of roadways (Washington and Adams drives) to gravel walkways for pedestrians, October 28, 1975, by Jim Wallace, SIA Acc. 11-009, 75-13713-22.
Preserving Smithsonian World, The First Steps
As a result of a generous grant, the Archives will soon catalogue and rehouse around 1,750 at-risk audiovisual media related to Smithsonian World.
When Smithsonian Productions ceased operations in February 2002, the Archives received a large influx of their collections. Originally established as the Office of Telecommunications in 1975, Smithsonian Productions was the video, audio, film, and digital media production center for the Smithsonian Institution for over twenty-five years. One of the programs they produced was Smithsonian World, an educational television series that ran from 1984-1991, and won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Information Series in 1987 and 1990. The series consisted of six seasons, with each season containing five to seven one-hour episodes. Smithsonian World explored people, ideas, and events that shape world culture, blending art, science, history, and the humanities to create an exciting harmony among disciplines. The production was narrated by historian David G. McCullough and co-produced by WETA-TV for broadcast on the Public Broadcasting Service.
Due to its sheer size and the variety of formats represented, many Smithsonian Productions collections have sat unprocessed since the early 2000s. As a result, many of the collections have been stored in inappropriate conditions. The 16mm motion picture films are currently housed in plastic bags inside of rusting film cans with poorly applied labels. The 35mm final show masters are housed in cardboard boxes with no barrier between the film and the acidic cardboard. The ¼-inch audiotapes are housed in their original, poor quality clamshell boxes inside of cardboard boxes stuffed with aging newspaper that acts as padding for the box contents.
In March 2019, the Archives was awarded funding from the Smithsonian National Collections Program’s (NCP) Collections Care and Preservation Fund to support the cataloging and rehousing of audiovisual media related to Smithsonian World. This project will address approximately 1,750 unprocessed audiovisual assets that are at risk due to inherent physical condition, improper housing, and lack of intellectual control. The primary goals of this project are to improve the physical storage condition of the films and audiotapes through stabilization and rehousing efforts, and to provide better intellectual access to these materials through the creation of item-level catalog records.
This stabilization and access project will focus specifically on the unprocessed audiovisual materials from Seasons 1 and 2 of Smithsonian World. As part of the project, a contracted audiovisual archivist will generate item-level metadata, rehouse the motion picture film and audiotapes, and aid in the creation of new finding aids to increase access to approximately 1,750 of these currently hidden materials. In completing this project, the Archives can prioritize the collections for digitization based on condition assessments performed by the contractor, and provide better access to these materials through online discoverability for researchers.
The project is expected to run from June 2019 to August 2020, so stay tuned for more updates as the project gets underway!
Related Collections
- Smithsonian Institution Office of Telecommunications Productions, 1984-1991,1995-1998,2003, Smithsonian Instituton Archives, Acc. 08-081
Related Resources
- "Television and the Smithsonian: Worldly Success," by Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Wonderful Women Wednesday: Judy Gradwohl
Judy Gradwohl was a researcher, curator, environmental policy specialist, digital content developer, and leader at the Smithsonian, 1985–2016. She conducted research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and National Zoo, and eventually became the MacMillan Associate Director for Education and Public Engagement at the National Museum of American History in 2004. Notably, Gradwohl established Smithsonian’s Office of Environmental Awareness and helped produce Smithsonian’s first website. #Groundbreaker
You Spin Me Round - Frisbee Festivals on the Mall
Starting in 1977, the National Air and Space Museum, with assistance from the International Frisbee Association, Wham-O Manufacturing Company, volunteer instructors from several states, and the Washington Area Frisbee Club, held their first Frisbee Festival on the National Mall.
These days you'll sometimes find kids tossing around a frisbee on the National Mall or you'll see the lunchtime Ultimate Frisbee players engaged in friendly competitions. In the late 1970s until the early 1980s, over Labor Day weekend, this play happened at a much larger scale when the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) welcomed frisbee champions, frisbee fans, frisbee catching dogs, and the curious public to its Frisbee Festival.
NASM first held it's Frisbee Festival,the brainchild of Bill Good in NASM's Art Department, on September 4, 1977. NASM Director, Michael Collins liked the idea and planning began in the spring of 1977. Sponsored by NASM, with assistance from the International Frisbee Association, Wham-O Manufacturing Company, volunteer instructors from several states, and the Washington Area Frisbee Club, the Festival consisted of demonstrations by world class frisbee disc champions and disc catching dogs, as well as workshops.
The first meeting to plan the festival was held in April 1977. Good enlisted the help of two fellow Frisbee enthusiasts from NASM, planetarium officer Jerry Barbely and public affairs officer Lynne Murphy. Also included in the planning was Larry Schindel, an ultimate Frisbee player from Maplewood, New Jersey who had recently moved to the area and was beginning to form the Washington Area Frisbee Club. The Festival was originally conceived to include competitions, workshops, and exhibitions, but was pared down to include just exhibitions and workshops as a result of the increased logistical complexities having competitions would entail. The decision was to make the event about having fun and for the purpose of public enlightenment and participation. The Festival was billed as the world's best attended, non-competitive disc festival, and the 1980 Festival attracted more than 10,000 people.
Special thanks to photographer, Nathan Benn, for permission to use his images of the 1977 NASM Frisbee Festival. And on a personal note, the Smithsonian staff t-shirts are spectacular!
Related Collections
- Record Unit 339: National Air and Space Museum, Office of Special Events, Events Files, circa 1971-1989, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Accession 11-009 - Smithsonian Photographic Services, Photographic Collection, 1971-2006, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Related Resources

Link Love: 5/24/2019
Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
Mark the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment by visiting a DC museum! [via WAMU]
The New Yorker profiles a New York landscape contractor whose employees are goats. [via New Yorker]
The University of Calgary has unveiled a database of bees! [via infoDOCKET]
Learn how web archives captured new insights on recent Luxembourgish elections. [via Archive-It]
The Virtual Archaeology Museum has just released 3D models of shipwrecks! [via Smithsonian]
Celebrate fifteen million newspaper pages digitized for the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America database with new data visualizations. [via Library of Congress]
NPR shows how volcanologists use ping-pong balls to simulate volcanic eruptions. [via NPR]

Sneak Peek 5/27/2019
Exterior view of South Shed, looking northeast with Smithsonian Institution Building, or Castle, in view, April 18, 1974. Built in 1898, the South Shed was used for the preparation of exhibition specimens, and later as the "Bug House." It was demolished in the fall of 1975 in preparation for the Victorian Garden which opened in 1976.
Hold on Loosely
In honor of National Paper Clip Day, we asked for help from our fellow institutions to show off their paper clip and fastener collections. So.....♪just hold on loosely, But maybe let go, If you cling too tightly, You're gonna cause a hole (tear or rust mark on the document). ♪
Whether we love to hate them, or hate to love them, paper clips are a huge part of working in archives. In an attempt to showcase this little contraption, we did a call out to the twitterverse for other archivists to share their collection of paper clips. Needless to say, it was not a disappointment. Now go forth archivists! And remember Clippy will always be there to *help*.
Thanks to all the archives, libraries, and archivists that contributed images for this fun and whacky blog.
Related Resources
- "Keeping It All Together: Paper Fasteners at the National Archives," by Alan Walker, Pieces of History, The National Archives and Records Administration.
- The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are,by Henry Petroski.
- "History of the Paper Clip," from Early Office Museum.

Wonderful Women Wednesday: Dr. Katherine Ralls
Dr. Katherine Ralls, Senior Research Zoologist Emerita, Center for Conservation Genomics, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, was one of the first scientists hired at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and is a founder of the Society for Conservation Biology. She has conducted research in mammalogy and conservation biology at the Smithsonian since 1973. #Groundbreaker
Some more IIIF-y Collections
The Smithsonian Institution Archives begins to further implement the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
About a year ago, I wrote a post to introduce our new collection viewer. Though the change was slightly inconspicuous, it actually pointed to a much bigger transition that was happening on our site. That shift began when the Archives adopted the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF, pronounced “triple-eye-eff”).
All of our single collection images now boasted their own IIIF manifest files. These manifest files, a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) files that contain the structured metadata associated with a collection item and a link to a full-size image of the object. These manifest files can be loaded into and ready by any IIIF viewer in order to pull up and view that given collection item. That way, you could compare two IIIF-enabled items from different institutions. For example, I highlighted comparing a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh from the Harvard Art Museums and a picture of an otter from our own collection.
I’m not sure why anyone would want to compare 19th-century post-impressionist painters with members of the weasel family, but you can. A more likely example would be comparing an engraving of James Smithson with a bust of James Smithson.
Since the roll out, IIIF has been spreading through our site. It’s even on our search result pages as thumbnails. Meanwhile, our multi-paged documents pages haven’t changed at all. They had not been IIIF enabled. Instead, all they featured was a thumbnail, a link off site.
Why no love for our multi-paged documents? The answer has to do with technical limitations that were present at the time. While our centralized image and metadata repositories did a great job at creating manifests for us, they couldn’t handle big multi-paged documents.
Luckily, due to requirements of the old system we used, we were generating xml files containing structural metadata. 2,000 of them, in fact. These files are a lot like the JSON files we need for IIIF, but they were just in a different format. A transform later, and those 2,000 xml files were converted into the IIIF friendly JSON files.
We still needed a place to put them.
As I’m writing a blog to introduce our first few multi-paged documents going out, you may have guessed that we figured that part out too. Now that we’ve managed to clear up those few technical hurdles, we’re slowly starting to push them out on our site (they do require a bit of manual labor to point our metadata services to the JSON files). The first few collections you’re likely going to notice them have to do with Smokey Bear.
https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_14926
https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_14927
https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_14925
https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_14917
If you play around with those collections (actually, any of our IIIF collections) and you have a really keen eye, you may have noticed a slight change to our viewer. Specifically, in the tool bar.
Our viewer now has a download button on it. That button will give you two options. One, you can grab the manifest file for that collection so you can pull it into another IIIF viewer. The other option is to download a copy of the image you are currently viewing.
Eventually we will get all of our 2,000 multi-paged collections hooked up to our new viewer. But, in the meantime, feel free to check out the cool collections of Smokey Bear. It’s a great way to kick off his 75th anniversary.
Related Resources
- "Some IIIF-y Collections," by Andrew Whitesell, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- "Some Web Developer Career Advice," by Andrew Whitesell," The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- "The Search Server is Dead, Long Live the Search Server.," by Andrew Whitesell, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Link Love: 5/31/2019
Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
An animal behaviorist found the fossilized remains of a fifty million-year-old school of fish—while on vacation in a dinosaur museum! [via New York Times]
Smithsonian Magazine profiles the U.S. National Tick Collection, currently housed at Georgia Southern University. [via Smithsonian]
The Washington Post discusses the historic implications of Lonnie Bunch's upcoming Secretaryship. [via Washington Post]
The National Museum of Natural History’s new fossil hall will open Saturday, June 8! [via Washington Post]
American Libraries Magazine explores the advantages of library-in-laundromat initiatives. [via American Libraries]
Diana Marsh, Caitlin Haynes, and Gina Rappaport review the ethical challenges surrounding access to Native archival materials at the National Anthropological Archives. [via Society of American Archivists]
Watch as the UK’s National Gallery tours a 17th-century self-portrait in women’s prisons. [via Future of Museums]

Sneak Peek 6/3/2019
Secretary-elect Lonnie G. Bunch III after his appointment as associate chair of the Department of Social and Cultural History at National Museum of American History, October 4, 1991, by Laurie Minor.
Rolling Up Our Cardigans with Record Unit 95
Thanks to a generous grant from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, the Archives will digitize, catalog, and make available 7,500 historic photographs of the Smithsonian from Record Unit 95.
Researchers, staff, and pretty much everyone else—rejoice! Because thanks to a recent grant we received from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will digitize, catalog, and make available forty percent of Record Unit 95.
But in order to recognize why this opportunity is so exciting, it is important to understand what this collection represents and how it came to the Archives.
This particular historic collection of photographs documents the people, buildings, exhibitions, programs, objects, and more that have formed today’s Smithsonian Institution. Many of the images in this collection reveal the happenings at the Smithsonian during its earliest years in the nineteenth century and leading up until the 1960s.
At the end of the project, some images you might explore are scenes from the first days of the National Zoological Park, including taxidermy mammals and birds, plants, and geological specimens. Additionally, many of these photographs freeze moments in time in Washington, D.C’s ever-changing landscape. Below are some of Photo Archivist Marguerite Roby’s favorite photographs from the collection that are already available on our website.
Another important aspect about this record unit to understand is how it became a collection. And quite frankly, this unit of photographs is pretty random. The Archives maintains this record unit as a central file to document the history of the Smithsonian. It’s a combination of reference files which were created by various administrative offices and individual photographs, which were discovered separately from manuscripts or collections. Because these records originate from a variety of sources, they require an above-average amount of research.
That’s where the grant funding comes in.
The funds generously provided by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee will be used to hire a digital imaging technician who will digitize and catalog 7,500 records over a six-month period. After that period, our photo archivists will work to provide detailed metadata in order to give context to those records. This project is scheduled through February 2020, so stay tuned for some of our favorite finds.
Related Collections
- Smithsonian Institution, Photograph Collection, Record Unit 95, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Related Resources
- “A Crafty Way to Support the Smithsonian,” by Pamela M. Henson, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- “The Life Work of Smillie,” by Effie Kapsalis, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- “The Woman Behind the Camera,” by Marguerite Roby, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Smithsonian Women’s Committee, website

Wonderful Women Wednesday: Laurie M. Penland
Laurie M. Penland, Diving Officer for the Smithsonian Scientific Diving Program, has traveled the globe providing diving support and training since 2005. She is also a professional photographer, capturing underwater photographs and videos for the Smithsonian. #Groundbreaker