Letters, writings, business records, printed matter, photographs and art works.

Correspondence; scrapbooks; photographs and photo albums; art works; sketchbooks; catalogs; and clippings.

More than 300 reels of 16mm black and white and color film, silent and sound, fiction and documentary motion picture film documenting jazz and related musical performances, social and popular dance styles and performances, jazz musicians, performance locales, and documentation of African-American popular culture. A list of featured performers in the collection is shown below. The films are frequently compilations produced by Smith for lectures.

Floyd Levin was a Los Angeles textile manufacturer who turned his passion for jazz into a second career as an influential jazz journalist and historian. The collection consists of research materials including biographical files. In addition, there are numerous photographs that were taken and collected by Levin.

Manuscript and printed textual material, photographic prints and negatives, slides, audio tapes, film, original and reproduction artwork, maps, scrapbooks, and historical and natural artifacts related to the history of African exploration and natural history, dating primarily from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Includes correspondence, drafts of publications, diaries, account books, ephemera, posters, newsclippings, biographies, memoirs, portraits, and the former personal property of selected explorers, big game hunters, missionaries, pioneers, and naturalists in Africa.

The Smithsonian Institution Festival of American Folklife, held annually since 1967 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was renamed the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1998. The materials collected here document the planning, production, and execution of the annual Festival, produced by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (1999-present) and its predecessor offices (1967-1999). An overview of the entire Festival records group is available here: Smithsonian Folklife Festival records.

The J. Horace McFarland Collection includes over 3,100 photographic images of private and public gardens throughout the United States, as well as some from foreign countries, dating from 1899 to 1963. Many of these images, generated for Mount Pleasant Press (later the J. Horace McFarland Company), were used to illustrate trade catalogs published by the firm as well as journal and newspaper articles. The collection also contains color records that were used as reference aids during the printing process, plant patents, and various publications of the McFarland Company.

The Technical Reference Files comprise an artificial collection that currently contains 1,900 cubic feet of aviation and space related materials, organized in 22 subject series. File materials include photographs, press releases, clippings, correspondence, reports, and brochures, on individuals, organizations, events, and objects.

This collection is comprised of photographic and manuscript materials, primarily created by Eliot Elisofon to document his travels and work. The images portray many aspects of African life and culture including agriculture, wildlife, archaeology, architecture, art and artisans, children, cityscapes and landscapes, leaders, markets, medicine, recreation, ritual and celebration, and transportation. The manuscript materials include correspondence, essays, clippings, puobligations, notes, research, and itineraries.

This collection contains over 37,000 35mm slides, 3,000 glass lantern slides and garden files that may include descriptive information, photocopied articles (from journals, newspapers, or books), planting lists, correspondence, brochures, landscape plans and drawings. Garden files were compiled by Garden Club of America (GCA) members for most of the gardens included in the collection. Some gardens have been photographed over the course of several decades; others only have images from a single point in time. In addition to images of American gardens, there are glass lantern slides of the New York Flower Show (1941-1951) and trips that GCA members took to other countries, including Mexico (1937), Italy, Spain, Japan (1935), France (1936), England (1929), and Scotland. A number of the slides are copies of historic images from outside repositories including horticultural and historical societies or from horticultural books and publications. The GCA made a concerted effort in the mid-1980s to acquire these images in order to increase its documentation of American garden history. Because of copyright considerations, use of these particular images may be restricted.