Smithsonian Gardens
Archives of American Gardens
Quarterly Report for July – September 2010
For the Garden Club of America’s Garden History and Design Committee
Smithsonian Institution Staff
● Barbara Faust, Associate Director, Smithsonian Gardens, (SG), Office of Facilities
Management and Reliability (OFMR)
● Cindy Brown, Manager, Horticulture Collections Management and Education branch
(HCME)
● Paula Healy
}
● Joyce Connolly } Museum Specialists, SG, AAG
● Kelly Crawford }
Mission Statement
The Archives of American Gardens (AAG) both collects and preserves a visual record of
representative American gardens and their features as well as the work of select
landscape practitioners, and documents the activities and collections of the Smithsonian
Gardens.
AAG’s mission is to collect and make available for research use unique, high-quality
images of and documentation relating to a wide variety of cultivated gardens throughout
the United States that are not documented elsewhere since historic, designed, and
cultural landscapes are subject to change, loss, and destruction. In this way, AAG strives
to preserve and highlight a meaningful compendium of significant aspects of gardening
in the United States for the benefit of researchers and the public today and in the future.
AAG Digital Standards
Kelly and Joyce participated in a Creating a Digital Smithsonian program on September
16 that highlighted numerous digitization initiatives throughout the Smithsonian. Their
table-top presentation explained AAG’s born digital image submission standards (the
AAG Digital Submission Policy). With over two dozen digital submissions documented
in less than two years, AAG’s policy has been a real-world success thanks to the work of
numerous GCA volunteers.
Outreach Presentations for the GHD Committee
Each GHD Zone Rep has received CD’s with PowerPoint presentations on, among other
things, the history of the GCA Collection, how to document a garden for the AAG, two
Smithsonian American Garden Legacy exhibitions (Feast Your Eyes: The Unexpected
Beauty of Vegetable Gardens and Exploring Garden Transformations, 1900-2000) that
featured numerous images from the GCA Collection, and a customized PP presentation
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(with script) that highlights the GCA Collection and garden history and design in each
Rep’s particular zone. Presenters can either use the presentations as is, or tailor them to
their own particular needs.
We hope your GHD volunteers will have an opportunity to present one or more of these
programs to their clubs in the future in order to highlight the critical importance of the
GCA Collection and the many ways in which it is used by researchers. Some of the
presentations may be helpful for garden documentation workshops as well.
Mystery Gardens
We continue to solicit help with our ongoing Mystery Gardens project. Mystery Gardens
are those gardens in the AAG that are either unidentified or lack the necessary Owner
and/or Photographer Releases that allow them to be made available for research use.
Please urge your clubs to visit AAG’s Mystery Gardens webpage at
www.gardens.si.edu/horticulture/res_ed/AAG/mystery/mysterygardens.htm if they haven’t
already. Well over 100 images have been identified by GCA members and non-GCA
parties alike; these identifications add critical informational value to these formerly
unidentified images.
Please let us know if you have clubs in your zone that may be interested in following up on
identified gardens that lack an Owner’s Release—it is especially critical to address these
gardens since many were part of the GCA’s original deposit with the Smithsonian in 1987.
Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS)
Please remind your clubs that over 20,000 images from the GCA Collection are available
for searching on SIRIS at www.siris.si.edu! This web site features over 1.8 million
catalog records for library and archival holdings throughout the Smithsonian. Although
AAG accounts for less than 2% of a total of that total (almost 32,000 catalog records),
there were over one million SIRIS hits on AAG images in 2008 and 2009! Our challenge
now is to revisit early GCA Collection catalog records on SIRIS that are not linked to
images in order to address any unresolved copyright and use issues.
Don’t hesitate to contact any one of us at AAG if you need help with navigating the
SIRIS search screens, whether it be for the first time or for pointers on how to create
specialized searches with multiple parameters (e.g. arbors in Arkansas). We are here to
help in any way that we can. Also, please contact us if you find errors in any of AAG’s
catalog records in SIRIS. We welcome your assistance in improving the quality of the
information AAG has in its SIRIS records.
SIRIS Blog
AAG is one of several Smithsonian archives that regularly contribute to the
Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center blog: http://si-siris.blogspot.com/ . The blog
features brief, intriguing snippets that highlight a wide variety of archival holdings at the
Smithsonian. You’ll be amazed at some of the things you will learn by browsing through
this resource. To see just the AAG blogs, scroll down the page until you reach the Labels
section in the right hand column, then click on Gardens.
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Research and Outreach
AAG received a total of 37 requests for information from July 1 to September 30; 18 of
the requests involved holdings in the GCA Collection. Of particular note are queries we
received from a researcher writing a book about an architectural firm active in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and two landscape historians compiling
information for two different historic landscape reports. HCME staff also assisted
several Smithsonian units needing SG images for outreach purposes. More and more
inquiries are coming in to AAG through its email address aag@si.edu which appears on
the SG website.
In addition, AAG staff handled a number of inquiries from GCA members and GHD
Reps, some of whom were writing articles for the GCA Bulletin or their club newsletters,
putting together presentations, reports, award nominations or flower show exhibits for
their clubs or GCA Headquarters, or checking on the status of existing garden
documentation in the GCA Collection.
This past quarter the work of the Akron GC was featured in an article on the AAG in the
Akron Beacon Journal dated September 18. The article mentions the GCA Collection
and includes quotes from Kelly Crawford! See
http://www.ohio.com/news/first/103192699.html to read all about it.
We will be sure to alert you to any other publications (that we are aware of) that refer to
or use images from the GCA Collection. Thank you for letting us know of any you come
across as well—it is a huge help as we don’t always know (despite our best efforts) where
GCA Collection images will appear. Please remind your clubs to let us know if they
wish to use any GCA Collection images in presentations, newsletters, etc. This enables
us to track how the collection is being used and by whom which helps to justify our
operation to Smithsonian management.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions (including whether a particular garden
might be a good candidate for documentation) or requests for brochures or geographic
lists of gardens in the AAG, etc.--we are always happy to help out whenever we can!
GCA Garden Submission Statistics for July – September 2010
Thank you for the garden submissions that you send to us throughout the year for the
GCA Collection. Remember, you don’t have to wait for a GHD meeting to submit
documentation to AAG, but you should hang onto a submission if you want to present it
at a GHD meeting. We’re grateful to each and every GCA volunteer for the time, effort,
and dedication that goes into documenting the gardens that are submitted to the AAG.
Each submission adds to the GCA Collection and captures today’s garden history for
future generations.
This past quarter, AAG accessioned the following submissions from GCA Zones:
Zone I: -Zone II: -Zone III: -3
Zone IV: 1 garden (17 digital images)
Zone V: --Zone VI: 1 garden (9 slides)
Zone VII: -Zone VIII: -Zone IX: -Zone X: -Zone XI: 1 garden (20 slides)
Zone XII: 1 garden (14 digital images)
A special thank you to those clubs who documented gardens for the GCA Collection this
past quarter…
Zone IV: GC of Madison
Zone VI: Catonsville GC
Zone XI: Loveland GC
Zone XII: GC of Honolulu
Looking ahead to the next quarter, October – December 2010
1. AAG staff participate in a day-long Smithsonian Archives Fair on October 22. Kelly
and Joyce will give a PowerPoint presentation on J. Horace McFarland, a rosarian
and nursery catalog publisher from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, while Paula will staff a
table with information about AAG’s holdings and projects.
2. Kelly and Joyce will give another presentation on McFarland at the Mid-Atlantic
Regional Archives Conference in Harrisburg on November 13. They will be sharing
the stage with staff from the Pennsylvania State Archives and the USDA’s
Agricultural Library. McFarland’s papers and image library were split between AAG
and the other two repositories.
3. AAG staff continue to work with researchers, address reference requests, and process
incoming reproduction orders and publication requests.
4. Kelly and AAG’s volunteers continue to catalog images from new garden submissions
into the Smithsonian’s SIRIS database network.
5. AAG staff continue to review early GCA garden submissions to determine copyright
status of images and whether Garden Owner and Photographer Releases are in place
that would permit images to be put on the SIRIS network on the Internet.
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