Archives

"Take care of your book — it is the true companion in campaigns and in peaceful work," urges one poster found in the New York Public Library's Russian Civil War poster collection.

The New York Public Library Just Made More Than 180,000 Items Available Online

Instant gratification for curious minds

Archivists Are Trying to Preserve Paris’ Post-Attack Memorials

Future generations will know how Parisians responded to attacks in their city

Logs like this one are being digitized in museums all over New England and used to help scientists understand climate change.

Logbooks From 19th Century Whaling Ships Could Help Climate Change Scientists

A new crowdsourcing project lets amateur enthusiasts contribute, too

"History will be kind to me," wrote Winston Churchill, "for I intend to write it myself."

UNESCO Honors Winston Churchill's Writings With the Equivalent of World Heritage Status

Churchill's papers join the ranks of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Anne Frank's diary and the Magna Carta

Detail from the cover of the 1948 Green Book, a guidebook for black travelers.

A Black American's Guide to Travel In the Jim Crow Era

For decades, <i>The Green Book </i> was the black traveler's lifeline

A page of the original King James Bible

The Origins of the King James Bible

A handwritten draft of the world's most famous bible has been discovered in England

Mold Is Threatening Boston Public Library’s Rare Books

As spores are found in the stacks, it's time to battle a fuzzy foe

Preserving Old Computer Games Is Harder Than it Seems

There’s an art and a science to resurrecting now-defunct PC games

Don Herbert was "Mr. Wizard," an educator who loved spectacle as much as he loved science.

Meet Mr. Wizard, Television's Original Science Guy

In the 1950s and 1960s, Don Herbert broadcast some of the most mesmerizing, and kooky, science experiments from his garage

These Academics Are Outracing (and Outwitting) ISIS

Historians, archaeologists and librarians scramble to save precious cultural capital before it can be sold or destroyed by militants

The International Olympic Committee Just Rescued Its Priceless Video Archive

Seven years and 100,000 hours of work later, the IOC’s archive has been digitized and preserved

Archivists Uncover an Unfinished Memoir By Orson Welles

Fragments of “Confessions of a One-Man Band” discovered in a newly-acquired trove of documents

Archivists Are Uncovering Lost Mark Twain Stories

Digital archives reveal Samuel Clemens, struggling journalist

Etude 1, 1967- 1968, is a piece of Thermo fax paper with an image that looks like a four-leaf-clover, with four overlapping circles. Each circle has concentric inner circles composed of individual letters of the alphabet.

New Works by Nam June Paik Are Discovered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

While inventorying the massive archival materials left by the artist, a researcher comes across forgotten works of art

Rosa Parks addresses a crowd in 1989 on the 25th anniversary of the signing of the civil rights legislation.

The Library of Congress Now Has Rosa Parks’ Personal Letters

The loan of over 10,000 documents from the Civil Rights icon’s personal life reveals her complexity and inner struggles—as well as one solid pancake recipe

Creep Through Albert Einstein’s Love Letters

The Digital Einstein archive offers a look into the great physicist's writings

Prelorán left Argentina and eventually settled in Los Angeles. He's shown here during the filming of Casabindo in 1977.

Rescuing Jorge Prelorán’s Films From Storage And Time

The Smithsonian’s Film Archives is reintroducing the world to the influential work of the Argentine-American filmmaker

A new Archives of American Art exhibition, "A Day in the Life," looks inside 35 diaries of American artists.

Peering into the Secret Diaries of American Artists

A new Archives of American Art exhibition looks at how artists documented their lives before social media

A page out of the diary of William H. Dall, one of the many documents being transcribed by the Smithsonian Transcription Center's small army of volunteers. At the ripe age of 21, Dall set off in 1865 to explore the Arctic on a Western Union Telegraph Expedition.

The Smithsonian Wants You! (To Help Transcribe Its Collections)

A massive digitization and transcription project calls for volunteers at the Smithsonian

Visitors wait in line at the National Archives to view the Declaration of Independence (against the wall, center right), preserved under glass and special lighting, ahead of the Fourth of July Independence Day holiday in Washington, July 3, 2013.

The National Archives Wants to Put Its Whole Collection on Wikimedia Commons

The National Archives and Records Administration plans to upload everything it can

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