All posts tagged with smithsonian-libraries

When I learned of the amazing opportunity to intern at the Smithsonian Libraries, I instantly knew I wanted to be a part of it. I was lucky enough to be chosen to be the Biodiversity Heritage Library In-Copyright Collection Management Intern. I knew the BHL was a digital library but, having no previous experience with a purely digital collection, I couldn’t begin to start making a guess. What I ended up doing was so much cooler than anything I could have anticipated. I got to spend the whole week pushing my attention to detail and love of consistency to the limits. Now that may sound boring to some but this is the kind of thing I do at home for fun.

Solenne Coutagne of the Bibliotheque Interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) in Paris visited the Smithsonian Libraries during a tour of library and museum collections in the DC area. Solenne is the manager of digital projects at BIU Santé, the largest medical library in France. On 19 April, she met with Martin Kalfatovic and Carolyn Sheffield to discuss digitization initiatives and learn about BHL’s workflows.  While on site, Jacqueline Chapman and Daniel Euphrat provided a tour of the Libraries’ scanning facility and overview of BHL’s scanning operations at the National Museum of Natural History. As part of her Smithsonian tour, Solenne also met with Leslie Overstreet in the Joseph F.

It is a small book, palm-size, with pages of less-than-fine paper, the well-worn letters of the type sometimes carelessly inked. The sparse woodcut illustrations are child-like in their simplicity and straight-forwardness. Yet John Josselyn’s New-Englands rarities discovered, printed in London in 1672, drew me in as I went about cataloging the work. Intrigued by the title and the early date of publication, I found myself reading an account of the landscape of my past, from Boston, “down east” (that is, up the coast as represented in the above illustration) to my place of birth, and points all around.