Today’s guest artist: Kathy.
To start this entry I should do a quick update on how Marty and I have been faring these past couple of weeks with our Anchorage-Stuttgart partnership. Working in our offices and communicating by e-mail we continue to make progress. Using the great digital images Marty took, I’ve been able to direct him on rehousing some of the most minute parts of the collection. We’ve also been able to place rehoused parts of the papers in their appropriate places in the stacks by my using Marty’s “stack Photos” to give him exact locations. I also had him group together the great three-dimensional artefacts from the collection that we will be keeping.
Marty completed a massive project of rehousing many of the Atwood family photos into albums and readied them to be added to the finding aid currently under construction as we process. He had been working on this project throughout his tenure with us and it was quite an accomplishment for him to see this completed. Stacey had almost completely rehoused a magnificent collection of photos Bob had taken in his journalistic travels and Marty, though my directions using his photos, completed it and transferred these albums to our stacks in the vault.
I then had Marty take detailed digital photos of Bob’s grouped photos from his personal and professional life. I’ve been able to study them and create specific instructions to have these all placed into albums thanks to Marty’s great labeling of the images. All of the rehousing will be done following the original order that I determined when I did several surveys of this entire collection during the initial part of the project and several times again before I moved to Germany. Marty has begun working on this and his enthusiasm for this entire project has been a great source of inspiration for us all.
From writing this update on how the processing of the collection continues, I would now like to mention other key people who have helped and continue to assist us in the Atwood papers project. It takes many hands and backgrounds to see something of this size completed properly and smoothly. Some of the other important contributors to the project include Winnie Treitline, Administrative Assistant, Dean’s Office; Michael Stallings, Joint Library Catalog Systems Administrator; and our Consortium Library Dean, Steve Rollins. Winnie, who no matter what always is there for all of us, has been instrumental in moving this project forward in spite of our geographically separated locations. The massive and complicated archival supplies request I gave to Winnie to order would have overwhelmed most people, but Winnie handled it all in stride, despite it coming from multiple sources with different systems. Of course everything showed up perfectly!
When we had a deadline for the Atwood Exhibit, Michael spent countless hours trying to get our oversized scanner up and running. He knew we needed it so he wouldn’t give up. It’s that kind of support that makes the library such a great place to work. Speaking of this great support, our Dean, Steve Rollins has also always been in the forefront of seeing that this project happens and that we have the tools we need to make it succeed. He even took some great digital photos of some of the Anchorage Times front pages for use in the Bob Atwood and Anchorage Times Exhibit on the Second floor of our library in the Alaskana Collection.
If you haven’t seen these two exhibits and the great Alaskana exhibit, please make sure you do. These exhibits show archives can be used in many ways and you’d be surprised at what amazing things you can find in our collections. This took a team effort of all of our Archives staff (Arlene, Mariecris & Nicole), Steve Rollins, Pacific Rim Studios in Seattle, and Tatiana Vayner who scanned so many of the original photos for us when she was a student worker. It not only showcases some of the gems from the Atwood family photos, but also in the case of the Alaskana Exhibit, from many of our other wonderful collections in the UAA Archives.
So now because of everything Marty has done lately I have to sign off and get back to work on the Atwood papers project to catch up!