Wow, what happened to May and June? I know what happened to May and June: we were busy! Plus, honestly, we all tend to take a lot of vacation around now so we can enjoy the glorious Alaska weather too.
Gwen made great progress on our migration to our new digital preservation platform and even managed to fit in some excellent training with Becky and Arlene so we can help out with that process. This project accounts for a LOT of Gwen’s time currently since it’s very labor intensive. Our rep from the software company told us that our files are far more organized than most of his clients (yay for us!) but even with that, it’s still a complicated and time-consuming process.
Our new FRED (Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device) arrived and we had an all day training on it. This machine will allow us to transfer digital materials off of their original media (whether that’s a hard drive, a floppy disk, or something else) without losing the metadata inherent to the files and without changing anything on the original media. All of this is incredibly important for ensuring that our digital collections are authentic to the original files.
Becky has continued her work on some of the larger collections in the Lands project as well as participating in all the other projects we’re doing. She’s making great progress on these collections.
Arlene has been all over the place, including a very large number of meetings. Among other projects, she’s been working to convert some legacy PDF finding aids for UAA records on our page to our standard format as we continue to make our website as accessible as possible.
And we’ve kept very busy with reference requests. We had about 80 hours of researcher appointments over the two months plus email interactions with about 40 individual researchers, usually consisting of multiple emails back and forth. And many more by phone. Plus several collection donor visits (including to Palmer and to Homer!) and discussions.
On top of all of that, we managed to finish up some collection description too.
Newly available:
An addition to the 4th Avenue Theatre plans. Thanks to Gina Hays for describing the addition!
EPH-0689: Alaska Housing Ministries, Inc. report; 1985.
HMC-1513: Imogene Slivsek papers; 1941-1946.