This month we described two new collections and added 86 new items to Alaska’s Digital Archives, in addition to participating in UAA’a STEM Day. Behind the scenes, we’ve been implementing new digital preservation policies and procedures.
Newly described collections:
HMC-1342: Anne D. Pasch papers; 1952-2014. Primarily slides of an Alaskan geologist and paleontologist.
Anne Pasch examining a concretion at the Talkeetna Mountain Hadrosaur dig site
HMC-1343: David F. DeLap Sr. papers; 1900-1981. Papers of an U. S. Army officer who served in Alaska between 1944 and 1946.
Map with Alaska hand-drawn on top of the Lower 48. From David DeLap Sr. papers.
Materials added to Alaska’s Digital Archives:
43 audio recordings from the Ruben Gaines papers.
43 images from the Fannie and John Woodiel papers.
Events and outreach:
Once again, Archives and Special Collections had a table at UAA’s STEM Day showing off some of the items from their collections related to STEM fields, including an album with prints of slides from the Anne D. Pasch papers, reprints of early medical books, and stereoviews from the early 1900s.
Archives and Special Collection booth at STEM Day
KTUU came to the Archives to interview Arlene about the David DeLap Sr. papers.
Other projects:
As part of our CLIR Recordings at Risk grant to digitize audiovisual materials related to health and medicine in Alaska, we are required to monitor the fixity of the resulting digital files to make sure that they do not change over time. Gwen has been implementing software and procedures to incorporate checksums (often described as the fingerprint of a file) into the Archives’ workflows for dealing with digitized materials and materials that come to us on CDs, thumb drives, and other digital media.