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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Institutional History Division Appendixes
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The Institutional History Division embarked upon a new era at the Smithsonian, welcoming the approaching millennium and the installation of the Smithsonian's eleventh Secretary, in addition to making significant progress on continuing projects. All IHD staff assisted in preparations for the installation of the new Secretary, Lawrence M. Small, in January of 2000, providing background information for speeches and on previous ceremonies. The IHD staff have continued to provide background on the history of the Institution to its new upper management, including readings on the history of the Institution and responses to specific queries. For the Joseph Henry Papers Project, annotations were completed for volume 9 of The Papers of Joseph Henry, which will focus on the years 1854-1857. The Historian's Office recorded oral history interviews with several staff members and a preservation program was initiated for the Oral History Collection. Nichols prepared a new SIA exhibit, "The Smithsonian at the Turn on the Century," and Henson served on the curatorial committee for the "Smithsonian Expeditions" exhibit which opened at the Miami Museum of Science. Henson and Nichols continued work on the Smithsonian Digital Library Project, an effort to make Smithsonian photographs and other images available via the Institution's website. Some 200 images with linked text records were digitized and placed on the Digital Library website. Steady progress was made by staff and volunteers on the IHD's SIRIS databases on the Oral History Collection, Smithsonian Chronology and Smithsonian Bibliography. Henson served on the committee to develop a new SIRIS webpac or public access interface, and also on a committee to standardize form/genre terms in the SIRIS archives catalog. FY2000 was a particularly challenging year for the Historian's Office due to major infrastructure problems. Repeated flooding of her office forced Henson to move out several times, and she was still enjoying the JHPP's hospitality at year end. Computer crashes also made significant inroads into productivity. For information on web-related work done by the Joseph Henry Papers Project, please see the Electronic Access and Outreach section of this report. Henson, in cooperation with Edie Hedlin, James Hobbins and John Huerta, continued a project to digitize the publications, The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History, by William Jones Rhees, published in 1879 and 1901, and to update this compilation of legal documents on the Smithsonian from 1900 to 2000. Henson continued research on phase two, the legal documents from 1900 to 2000. Work on published legal documents from 1826 to 2000 was near completion at the end of the year. Contractor Heather Ewing conducted research on our founding donor, James Smithson, while she was living in England during the past year. A former Smithsonian staff member, Ewing has in-depth knowledge of the history of the Institution and experience at conducting research in British archives. She uncovered a number of new documents about our enigmatic benefactor and hopes to continue the research next year. Research Associates, Collaborators, Fellows and Interns Research Associate Albert E. Moyer, chair of the Department of History at Virginia Tech, curtailed his research in FY 2000 due to a serious illness. Research Collaborator Catherine A. Christen completed her manuscript on field stations in Latin America for a special edition of the journal Americas. She attended the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in March and worked with Smithsonian fellowship applicant Eve E. Buckley on her research on Latin American botany. Research Collaborator Francis M. Greenwell delivered a memorial address commemorating the life of Dr. Charles O. Handley, Curator, Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History on September 15. He assisted Dr. James A. Dolph of Weber State University with a paper on William T. Hornaday and maintained contact with Dr. Estorigo Mendez, presently writing a book on the arthropods of Panama. He also pursued a wide variety of other historical and museological activities. Pedro M. Pruna-Goodgall, SIA Research Collaborator and member of the Cuban Academy of Natural Sciences, Havana, Cuba, gave a lecture on the Cuban malacologist, Carlos de la Torre, at the 6th International Congress of Medical Applied Malacology in Havana, 4-8 September 2000. Pruna also conducted additional research on de la Torre during a research visit to SI Archives during the past year. Pruna worked on plans for a joint Cuban-Smithsonian symposium at the Smithsonian in 2001. Henson and Rothenberg served as advisors to numerous students and scholars. Henson served as advisor to several Smithsonian predoctoral fellows: Juliet M. Burba, University of Minnesota; Briann G. Greenfield, Brown University; Juan Ilerbaig, University of Minnesota; Denise Meringolo, The George Washington University; Michael Robinson, University of Wisconsin; and James Todd Uhlmann, Rutgers University. Henson also served on a George Washington University American Studies Program dissertation committee for Joanne Gernstein-London, who completed her dissertation on unfulfilled plans to create a national military museum in Washington, D.C. The Historian's Office sponsored three interns during FY 2000. Andrea Quintero of St. Johns College of Santa Fe (summer of 2000) and Kristen Halloran of Smith College (fall of 2000) were interns with the History Office, conducting research on the legal history of the Smithsonian for the Smithsonian Documents project. Virginia E. Fritchey of Cornell University was an intern with the Joseph Henry Papers Project during the summer of 2000, conducting research on the scholarly status of authors who published in the Smithsonian's early publications. Doris Jensen, a former librarian at the U.S. Supreme Court, assisted Henson with her project on the legal history of the Smithsonian. Zoe Martindale continued to add entries to the image database and edit existing entries, in preparation for placing the database on-line with the Smithsonian Digital Library. Lillian Pharr and Carole Poling continued to prepare entries for the bibliography on the history of the Smithsonian. Poling learned to enter them into the new SIRIS Horizon service, speeding their availability. These volunteers allowed the Institutional History Division to complete far more work and make significant strides on important projects. Oral History and Videohistory Programs There were 52 reference requests for the Oral History and Smithsonian Videohistory Collections. Oral history interviews of Smithsonian staff and associates continued to be recorded, researched, transcribed, and made available to the public. Henson completed a series of interviews with David Challinor, former Assistant Secretary for Science/Research, to document his role in Smithsonian research programs during the Ripley and Adams eras. Henson continued interviews of Walter A. Shropshire, Jr., formerly of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center about his research in photobiology. She also recorded interviews of 5 individuals related to the Conservation and Research Center, at the CRC's 25th anniversary celebration. Philip K. Lundeberg, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History, was interviewed about the development of the field of museum security in the 1960s. The Office of Public Affairs donated an interview of the retiring Secretary, I. Michael Heyman. Several interviews conducted earlier on the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute were donated to the collection, as was the Graham Bell Fairchild Interview. The Polymerase Chain Reaction Videohistory Interviews were final processed and made available to the public. The Graham Bell Fairchild Interview was also opened for research use. The Paul E. Garber Interviews were final typed and will be made available early in the coming year. Transcription was completed on the African-Americans at the Smithsonian interviews, several of the Challinor and Shropshire interviews, and interviews of I. Michael Heyman and Abram Lerner, former director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In FY 1999 some oral history audiotapes were found to be deteriorating. An ongoing preservation plan was established for remastering the Oral History Collection and Videohistory Collection, based on a preservation survey conducted during the previous year. A Research Resources Grant was awarded to allow remastering of the tapes that are deteriorating. Audiotapes exhibiting "sticky shed" were remastered onto reel-to-reel analog tape and also digitized. Selected audio cassettes from 1996 Festival of American Folklife oral history interviews were remastered onto reel-to-reel tape to ensure their long term survival and improve their sound quality, based on a priority plan established last year. Both these projects will continue on an annual basis to ensure that the collection remains in good condition. In FY 2000, 20 interviews totaling 21.5 hours of tape were recorded for the oral history collection. Twenty-one interview sessions totaling 23 hours were transcribed on contract and by volunteers. The collection now consists of 679 interview sessions totaling 913.5 hours of audio and videotape interviews of 622 individuals. Of these 751.5 hours have been transcribed and 505.5 hours have been made available for research use. The Processing Procedures Manual was distributed to numerous organizations and individuals interested in learning about oral history, among them The Mount Vernon Ladies Association, The Swedish Academy of Sciences, Queensland Museum (Australia), and The Office of the Attorney General, State of Connecticut. The Smithsonian Videohistory Collection Catalog was distributed to a wide range of scholars, producers, and others interested in the collection in the United States, Sweden and Sri Lanka. This was a year of increasing involvement by the Joseph Henry Papers Project in public outreach. The highlight of the year for the Joseph Henry Papers project was its participation in "Joseph Henry Day" on June 15, 2000, in Galway, New York, the village in which Henry was raised. At the event at the Joseph Henry Elementary School, Marc Rothenberg presented a set of volumes of the Papers of Joseph Henry, as well as a copy of Albert Moyer's biography, Joseph Henry, to the New York state legislative library. Another event which spotlighted Henry's role in history was the symposium entitled "The Living Legacy of Scotland," held April 7 as part of the Tartan Day celebration. Marc Rothenberg introduced the forum and spoke about Henry, who was being acknowledged as one of the great figures of Scottish heritage in American history. The Henry Papers project utilized the Internet to disseminate information about Henry to wider audiences. The project participated in Model Editions Partnership, a joint venture of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the University of South Carolina, and twelve documentary editions. The Partnership intends to explore ways of creating web editions of historical documents which meet the traditional scholarly standards of printed editions, while making these materials more widely available through the web. As part of the second phase of this venture, selections from Volume 7 of The Papers of Joseph Henry were posted at the Partnership's website, www.adh.sc.edu. In addition, the Project has increased the material available on its own website, www.si.edu/archives/ihd/jhp. Among the additions are a survey of Henry namesakes and a selection of Henry documents both in facsimile and in transcription. Annotations were completed for Volume 9 of The Papers of Joseph Henry, documenting Henry's life from 1854 through 1857. These were the years in which Henry weathered a series of confrontations with his subordinates, acrimonious debates at the Board of Regents' meetings, and a congressional investigation to ensure that the legacy of James Smithson should continue to support a research institute rather than a national library. It was also during these years that Henry accepted the national collections from the United States Patent Office, further ensuring that the Smithsonian would evolve into the national museum/international center for research that it is today.  Smithsonian Institution Archives || Archives Division Institutional History Division || Joseph Henry Papers Project National Collection Program |