In this episode of Archiving AK, Arlene interviews Zane Treesh, the head of the Anchorage Museum’s Library and Archives. Zane splits his work between being a librarian and being an archivist for the Anchorage Museum. He talks about the kinds of materials they have, who their users are, and the…
The first month of 2019 has flown by, and somehow it is the first day of February already. This month we got back into the swing of things adding new items to Alaska’s Digital Archives, which was recently migrated to OCLC hosting. We also implemented a new solution for storing…
December was a fairly eventful month for us. November went out with a bang (a real one, a 7.0 earthquake with an epicenter very near Anchorage) and so our regular workload for early December was rewritten by needing to deal with the aftermath of the effects of shaking on a…
In this episode of Archiving AK, Gwen, Veronica, and Arlene tell their tales of the November 30th 2018 quake here in southcentral Alaska and then get together for a discussion of lessons learned and things observed. It’s a little longer than our standard podcast, but we hope you’ll forgive us…
November has come to a close, and while we normally try to get our monthly reports out before too long into the next month, the earthquake on November 30 put a dent in our plans (but not in our collections). We are back to normal operations and had some cleanup…
We’re back open to our normal hours on Wednesday, December 5. (With a few exceptions upcoming. See our main website page for details on those.) But we’re not quite cleaned up from the earthquake quite yet. Here’s our current status: Most archival collections are available for use but because the…
This may sound like a weird topic in the midst of dealing with clean-up after an earthquake, but bear with me here. There’s a few reasons. We’re nearly at capacity for physical collections, our vault is about 85-90% full. We’ve been doing a lot of rehousing of collections and moving…
In this episode of Archiving AK, archivist Gwen Higgins speaks with Dr. Jennifer Stone, a professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Jennifer discusses her decision to incorporate archival research into her History of English Language course and what she has learned from having her students use archival…
Going to visit people in their homes and offices to look at and pick up collections is a fairly regular occurrence around here. We like to think of them as archival field trips! We had one of those today, but this one was a little different than our normal trips.…
Every so often we get the question: my father/grandfather/uncle/great-uncle worked on the construction of the Alaska Highway. Is there the a list out there of all the people who did? How can I find out more about where he worked? The short answer to that is: there’s no list that…
