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We are currently recruiting volunteers to work with visitors in the Invention at Play exhibition and the Spark!Lab hands on center. Volunteers help visitors explore invention and innovation by facilitating hands on activities, managing interactive exhibits, and sharing stories and information about American invention.
Interested? Download the volunteer application form!
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The Lemelson Center launched its latest area of scholarly inquiry—“places of invention”—in our August 2007 Lemelson Institute. Sponsored by Dorothy Lemelson at the Lemelson Archives in Incline Village, Nevada, the Institute’s small, interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners examined the relationship between physical spaces and creativity. What is it about a particular place that excites a creative mind and makes it a “place of invention?” How do creative people shape the spaces in which they work? What combinations of elements make one place a hotbed of innovation while a similar place may founder? The findings of the Institute, now available on our Web site, are being used to inform the Lemelson Center’s documentation, exhibit, and programming activities.
Read the Lemelson Institute report.
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Smithsonian Creates Online Resource for History of Invention
The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center has debuted its new MIND (Modern Inventors Dcoumentation) program database, identifying the invention-related holdings of hundreds of archives across the United States and is the nation’s first database devoted exclusively to such documents. Invention-related collections in the database cover a variety of subjects, with many from medical, consumer, scientific, household and legal fields. It is continuing to grow as more archives, museums, libraries and historical societies report the contents of their invention-related collections to the Lemelson Center for inclusion in the MIND database.
Records can be searched by subject, inventor name, collection title or repository name. Users simply submit a key word to search and if the invention is in the database it will note what materials exist about the invention, which museum, archive or library holds the collection, and how to contact them for more details.
For more details, read the full news release.
Access the MIND Database.
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