Smithsonian Libraries

SIL Joins LibraryThing

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries is pleased to announce its participation in Library Thing. This free online service was originally created to help people catalog their own books more easily and has become a great way to link readers to books, interests and each other.

Combining the best of a commercial bookseller’s website and a typical library catalog, Library Thing takes book browsing to another level. It’s a fun and useful tool to work alongside the SIRIS catalog, not replace it, and connects users to the people and books that have helped build SIL. Users can now explore the personal library of James Smithson or the “Heralds of Science” collection of Bern Dibner on Library Thing. Smithson and Dibner join the likes of Leonardo daVinci, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin in the “Legacy Libraries” section which contains inventories of the book collections of notable figures.

Researchers can also utilize Library Thing by selecting records from SIRIS (one of 690 catalogs already integrated) to create personalized bibliographies or book lists. Users can make recommendations, create reviews or organize titles by creating their own tags. Because of the social aspect of Library Thing, patrons can connect with other users, find those with similar research interests and take a look at what their colleagues have collected.

James Smithson’s library on LibraryThing.com:
http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=JamesSmithson

Bern Dibner’s “Herald of Science” collection on LibraryThing.com:
http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=HeraldsOfScience

North American Indian Photograpy of Edward Curtis now on Flickr!

Wedding party - Qagyuhl
Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution

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

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

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

WiFi @ SIL

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

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

Portraits of Scientists and Inventors

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

Smithsonian Libraries on Flickr

The Smithsonian joins the Flickr Commons project on June 16!

The Smithsonian Libraries provided a selection of photographic portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. These portraits, part of a larger collection of over a 1,000 portraits in various media. The entire collection is available online at Scientific Identity: Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.

The Flickr Commons project provided Smithsonian staff an excellent opportunity for collaborations between our different museums and researcher centers. In addition to providing content, Smithsonian Libraries staff provided important technical and metadata skills which enhanced the success of the project.

• Visit the Smithsonian on the Flickr Commons
• See the Smithsonian Libraries "Portraits of Scientists and Inventors"

Flickr Commons is a new forum created by Flickr for cultural institutions to share their photographic collections. The Smithsonian was the fourth institution to join, following the Library of Congress, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.

About the Dibner Library Portrait Collection (Ron Brashear)

The scientific portrait collection in the Dibner Library was assembled by Bern Dibner. The images formed a fine research complement to the thousands of scientific books and manuscripts in the library he founded, the Burndy Library. Bern Dibner obtained most of the portraits during the 1940s from print dealers in Boston, London, and Paris. By 1950 he had about two thousand images and arranged them into ten scientific subdivisions: Botany, Chemistry, Electricity, Geology, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Technology, and Zoology. The portraits are of various types: woodcuts, copper and steel engravings, mezzotints, lithographs, oil paintings, and photographs. Many of them are images that were printed as separate items, used as gifts to send to colleagues and admirers. The exchange of portraits among scientists in the eighteenth century became a very popular form of correspondence. A number of prints also served as frontispieces of books and, unfortunately, a few of the prints in the collection had originally been bound as pages in books and removed some time in the distant past.

(photo above left: Portrait of Felix Nadar (1820-1910), Photographer and Aeronautical Scientist; see the picture on Flickr or in Scientific Identity)