When I took over as head of Archives and Special Collections in June of 2007, I had a lot of goals for the department. Most of those were user-focused and revolved around simplified access to collections. One of the things on my target list was our finding aids. Our finding…
A guest post from our summer intern: Anna Leinweber. Thanks Anna! As the summer intern visiting Alaska for the first time, I expected to learn many things about the state and its history while here. My expectations were that I would learn a great deal about Alaskan life and culture;…
It is hard to believe it is August already, but time flies when you are busy. Last month we released not one, but two episodes of our podcast, Archiving AK. Arlene became famous thanks to her interview with C-SPAN about our materials relating to the 1964 Alaska earthquake. In addition…
In episode 4 of Archiving AK, Veronica interviews Kevin Tripp and Greg Schmitz, audio/visual media archivists with Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association (AMIPA). We discuss the various collections held by AMIPA, their users, and the difficulties of preserving A/V material.
This bonus July episode of Archiving AK is an interview with Dr. Justin Rawlins, whose academic research relates to perception studies. He’s been looking at how Alaska is portrayed in media in the past and present, from educational films to reality TV. Dr. Rawlins teaches media and film studies at…
It’s so hard to stay inside in June in Alaska! But we managed to get a lot done anyhow. Here’s the June 2018 wrap-up: New personnel: Sara Rollins, a local high school student, is volunteering with us this summer for 2-3 days each week. She’s doing a wide variety of…
In the third episode of Archiving AK, archivists Gwen, Veronica, and Arlene discuss some of the tourism-related collections available here at the Archives. We look at how Alaska tourism has changed, what has remained the same, and how it is represented through the lens of the archival materials that have…
In the second episode of Archiving AK, archivists Gwen and Veronica interview researcher Pierce Bateman. Pierce has been visiting the Archives as a researcher since 2015: first as an undergraduate student, and more recently as a graduate student writing his thesis. In the episode, they discuss Pierce’s background, current research topic,…
May seemed to be a quiet month, but we kept busy with reference requests and speaking to donors. We also described four new collections and added 487 photographs to Alaska’s Digital Archives. Further details on what we have been up to are below: We released the second episode of Archiving…
We’re a teensy bit late on May Day this year. On May 1, we often celebrate May Day by doing something to help us out with preservation or disaster recovery planning. We’ve been getting some collections with old stills in recently so we decided it was time to figure out…
