Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Smithsonian Institution Archives

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The institution

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA), located in Washington, USA, maintain the archives of the Smithsonian Institution; contents relate to Smithsonian people, museums, galleries, zoological park and research facilities.

Overview of the partnership

The Archives are not at all new to cooperating with Wikimedia. This year they received Sarah Stierch as Wikipedian in residence from March to June; Sarah had already played the same role at the Archives of American Art in 2011. Since the first meeting with some members of the Wikimedia DC Chapter in 2010, hundred of Smithsonian staff members were involved in intensive Wikipedian training (some of them became good editors), many events were held such as edit-a-thons, and several volunteers were involved, primarily in writing articles for the English Wikipedia.

The WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge project managed to involve the Archives as well, as it did with other international institutions such as The National Archives Uk, the Brooklyn Museum or the Tropenmuseum, also with Sarah's help.

The Archives allowed the upload of more than 70 no known copyright restrictions pictures from their website, most of which are old black and white pictures from African scenarios or from exhibitions held during the last century, uploaded by WikiAfrica's tutor Michele Casanova in October 2012.

The story behind the picture: Henry

Looks like the huge, magnificent elephant (13 feet and 2 inches!) welcoming visitors inside the rotunda at the National Museum of Natural History has a name, Henry, although it is better known as the Fénykövi Elephant. The name is due to Josef J. Fénykövi, who killed it during a special expedition in 1955. The skin, weighing something like two tons, arrived at the Smithsonian a year later, and it took 16 more months to two taxidermists to prepare the full scale model with 11000 pounds of clay, following the indications which the Hungarian hunter had wrote down in this picture.

Collections in Context, di Mitch Toda

The story behind the picture: Theodore Roosevelt

Few people remember that in March 1909 the 26th President of the USA and Nobel prize for peace Teddy Roosevelt, when his term of office ended, left New York for a safari in east and central Africa (modern Kenya, Congo, Sudan). The expedition's goal was collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History^[1]. He and his group trapped and/or killed over 11,000 animals, including insects, moles, hippos, elephants; among these, over 500 big game animals - six of them were rare white rhinos. Hundreds of them were sent to Washington; they were so many that it took years to mount them all, and the Smithsonian shared duplicate specimens with other museums. Roosevelt, which was fond of natural history since childhood, described his experience in details in the book African Game Trails, where he wrote about the excitement of the chase, the people he met, and the flora and fauna he collected in the name of science.