Keeping track of your old photos can be a real challenge. But what would you do if your cache of photos reached back over a century and a half? For almost its entire history the Smithsonian Institution has had a photographer or photographic staff documenting artifacts, events, and exhibits. The body of work created dates back to 1869, when our first photographer, Thomas William Smillie, started our valuable photographic catalog. In 2008, the Archives took on the responsibility of caring for the Smithsonian's historic photographs, an estimated three and a half million images. This negative log book is the second to last in a series documenting almost forty years of the Smithsonian Photographic Services (SPS) work across the Institution.
Please help us transcribe these handwritten notebooks, our only key to understanding what is in these photographic collections lies in the negative logbooks recorded by the photographers.
Keeping track of your old photos can be a real challenge. But what would you do if your cache of photos reached back over a century and a half? For almost its entire history the Smithsonian Institution has had a photographer or photographic staff documenting artifacts, events, and exhibits. The body of work created dates back to 1869, when our first photographer, Thomas William Smillie, started our valuable photographic catalog. In 2008, the Archives took on the responsibility of caring for the Smithsonian's historic photographs, an estimated three and a half million images. This negative log book is the second to last in a series documenting almost forty years of the Smithsonian Photographic Services (SPS) work across the Institution.
Please help us transcribe these handwritten notebooks, our only key to understanding what is in these photographic collections lies in the negative logbooks recorded by the photographers.