September was our first month with reduced hours. If you’re wondering why we have reduced access hours, it’s because one of our archivists left in late August and several years of University budget cuts have meant a hiring freeze for the Consortium Library. We hope that eventually we’ll be able to fill that open position and get our hours back up to normal. In the meantime, we’re still answering emails (and often the phone) on our closed days and scheduling appointments for closed times as we can. Faculty please note: we’re still willing to teach classes and give tours on our closed days (actually it makes it easier to do that!) so if you’re interested having us teach your students about archives, let us know.
If you need to use materials and can’t make the Weds-Fri 10-4 hours, please contact us to arrange for an appointment. Reduced staffing also means increased likelihood of unexpected changes to scheduling: you can always check our main webpage for any changes in hours–we’ll post them just as soon as we know.
Protip for appointments: contacting us at least a week in advance of your visit increases the possibility of us being able to accommodate appointment hours, especially for evenings and weekends!
Collections newly available:
HMC-1341: Charles “Clif” Howard photographs; circa 1932-1943. 0.01 cubic feet. Photographs taken and collected by a radio operator for the Alaska Communications System.
UAA-0152: UAA. Bookstore special events records; 1999-2019. 0.95 cubic feet and 114 GB.
Poster for an event at the UAA Bookstore in 2002.
Items added to Alaska’s Digital Archives
12 audio recordings from the Ruben Gaines papers.
47 images from the McGlashan and Monsen family papers.
Metadata added to 7 images from the Leland Olson papers.
5 videos from the William J. Mills, Jr. papers.
1 video from Elinor Delight Gregg video.
3 videos from Alaska Native Health Career Program records.
Other
In a continuation from August’s big copy order, we finished that off with an additional 12654 pages of copies and 48 hours of scanning time. Our total for that project was just over 28,000 pages of copies and 100-115 hours of digitization time. If you’re curious, that’s about 6 cubic feet worth of records and wound up being just under 15 gb worth of file storage space for low resolution pdfs.
One of over 12,000 pages scanned for a recent reference request.
Gwen established a workflow for running checksums on our network attached storage (NAS) system to monitor file integrity. We’ll be doing this process quarterly.
Gwen taught an archival instruction session for about 25 students in Dr. Jennifer Stone’s History of the English Language class.
Arlene led a session called Archives Q&A for the MuseumsAlaska annual conference in Kodiak.