Curiosities and wonders: where do you put all those treasures? (From the Secretary).

Behind-the-scenes facilities at the Smithsonian can be more distant than you might imagine. The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), for example, has its principal storage facility, the Museum Support Center (MSC), in Maryland, a 20-minute drive from downtown Washington, D.C. The MSC is a technically sophisticated complex that keeps some of the nation's most valuable museum collections from risk and the encroachments of time.

When NMNH opened in 1910, it was the National Museum plain and simple, a grand repository for Smithsonian holdings that had outgrown their earlier homes in the Castle and what is now the Arts and Industries Building. The immense museum would take decades to fill, but even its great extent was no match finally for the Institution's acquisitive reach. By the 1960s, the collections occupied the building's galleries, storage areas and attic, which made the essential task of stewardship that much more difficult for the museum's staff.

After a decade and a half of planning and two years of construction, the Museum Support Center was dedicated in 1983. The plan of the complex is best appreciated from the air: four windowless storage pods, each three stories high and the size of a football field, with insulated walls 18 inches thick, fit neatly one to another, top to bottom, in a zigzag pattern across the landscape. A 20-foot-wide corridor, the core avenue of movement through the facility, separates the pods from a smaller, counterpart stretch of offices and laboratories. In the laboratories, various units, most but not all from within NMNH, conduct research that draws upon the collections. Here, for example, a long-term initiative between Smithsonian entomologists and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research uses the Institution's extensive mosquito collection to do disease-transmittal research that advances public health ...