Word: smithsonian
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...grin crosses Wilcox's face as he surveys the top floor of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. "There are a lot of wild, weird and wonderful things up here. We might even have the Raiders' Lost Ark stashed away some place, catalogued as miscellaneous archaeology...
...Raiders' Lost Ark is there, it should turn up soon. Wilcox and the Smithsonian's 266 other curators are giving "the nation's attic" its first good cleaning, a task that ranks as one of the most ambitious museum inventories ever undertaken. They expect to catalogue and computerize 78 million different items by the time the "Great Counting," as they call it, has been completed...
...started, as many important things do in Washington, as cocktail-party chatter. At a museum reception in 1978, Representative Sidney Yates good-naturedly challenged Paul Perrot, an assistant secretary at the Smithsonian, to prove that he could produce every object listed in the records. Yates, an Illinois Democrat whose subcommittee oversees Smithsonian funding, was curious about how many items had been lost or stolen over the years...
...appropriated $2.4 million for an undertaking that the curators had always regarded as impossible, if not downright laughable. The nation's attic was as badly organized as the average homeowner's; junk and jewels had been piling up helter-skelter since 1846, when Congress founded the Smithsonian with a $500,000 bequest from James Smithson, an Englishman who left his estate to establish a national museum...
...Smithsonian Institution will stage six large exhibitions of Roosevelt memorabilia. The Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Corcoran Gallery will mount shows of their own. So will Harvard, the Universities of California, Texas, Illinois and at least a dozen more...