Do you have photographs of Alaska that you want to have digitized? Are you looking for an opportunity to share those photos with the world? Would you like to further the educational mission of your university by making your photos available for research? Well, we have a solution.
We are excited to introduce our Sharing Community Images Project as an opportunity for the community to get involved with the Archives and share their photos with the world. We will be holding our pilot event for University of Alaska Anchorage employees in the Archives as part of Development Day on Thursday, May 12, 2016. If you’re interested in this but aren’t a UAA employee, keep watching here: we’ll be doing some public events in October 2016 for Archives Month.
What is the Sharing Community Images Project?
As part of our ongoing effort to document the diverse perspectives represented in our community, we invite community members to contribute their own photographs to the Archives. We will have a number of scanning stations set up in the Archives, which Archives staff will use to digitize the photos. We will also be accepting photographs created digitally. The digitized photographs will be made available to the public for research and use through Alaska’s Digital Archives, furthering the Archives’ primary goal of providing access. The Archives will also keep high-resolution master copies of the images, preserving a small slice of life in Alaska. Participants in the project will receive high-resolution digital copies of their photographs.
What should you bring?
Our collections have a focus on various aspects of Alaskan life and history. In order to maintain that focus we are limiting the scope of this project to photographs taken in Alaska. However, we encourage participants to bring photographs from any time period, including the present. We also hope to get photographs that portray a wide variety of subjects, including events, scenery, wildlife, buildings, and people. Because our goal is to provide access and allow the copying and use of the digital images, we ask that you bring photographs that are in the public domain or to which you own copyright (i.e. you or one of your parents were the photographer).
Due to time constraints, we will only be able to scan three photographs per person. We have the equipment to scan photographic prints, slides, and negatives, and we are happy to scan any of those formats. Please be sure to bring the original photographs, rather than photocopies. We will also be accepting photographs taken digitally with a digital camera or cell phone. If you would like to submit digital photographs, please bring them to us on a USB drive, SD card, or CD.
How to participate:
If you are a UAA employee and would like to participate in the inaugural Sharing Community Images Project event, please sign up for the workshop on the Development Day webpage.
In addition to bringing your photographs to scan, we have a couple of forms for you to fill out.
In order to make the photographs available for use on Alaska’s Digital Archives, we need permission to authorize use of the photographs. Our image use form (pdf) allows you to retain copyright while providing us with permission to provide access and allow use of the photographs. You can either fill it out in advance and bring it with you, or we’ll have copies here for you to sign.
When we add images to Alaska’s Digital Archives, we also include descriptive information about the photographs, such as the creator, location, dates, and subjects of the photographs. This is the information we typically put on images when we place them in the Alaska’s Digital Archives. When you bring in your photographs, one of our archivists will work with you to gather the information.
We look forward to working on this project! Thank you so much for being willing to share your memories with the many people who are interested in Alaskan photographs worldwide. Again, if you’re not a UAA employee but want to participate, we’ll be doing this again in October 2016 during Archives month. Keep an eye out here, or on our Twitter (CLArchives) or Facebook feeds for more details. If you’d like to have us do this with your community organization, please contact us: we’ll see what we can arrange!
Edit (4/4/16): If you’re not a regular reader of our social media sites (or don’t want to trust you’ll see our postings!) go ahead and shoot us an email. As we get further dates set up for October we’ll make sure we forward you the link to our blog entry with those dates in it. Contact information is available in the “About Us” link above.–Arlene