As an archivist I am often asked “what does someone use an archive for?” The question may seem easy to answer—many assume that most users of archives are scholars or historians. But researcher questions vary with each researcher who walks through the door, calls us on the phone, or sends…
Our crew’s professional reading today was the proposed user metrics document created by a SAA and ACRL/RBMS* joint task force. Sound boring? It’s not at all! And it’s incredibly important work because in the end, pretty much everything archives do is about our users. User statistics help us serve our…
It’s that time of year for another Archives’ potluck based on an exhibit. Our first ever exhibit potluck, Convalescent’s Banquet, while a learning experience, was pretty tasteless, and last year, Alaska Lunch, provided some interesting Alaskan based dishes. But this year, we decided to do things a little differently. We based…
Did you know? That email address on all of the Alaska’s Digital Archives pages goes to us! Alaska and Polar Regions Collections up at UAF handled the questions that came in for a long time, but last year we decided it was our turn to help out. We thought we’d…
Becky the Archives’ intern here, ready to ask all the “dumb” questions so you don’t have to! I’ve been working in the UAA Archives this past semester, and I’ve stumbled across a few common areas of confusion that I’ve decided to address for those of us just dipping our toes in…
Do you have photographs of Alaska that you want to have digitized? Are you looking for an opportunity to share those photos with the world? Would you like to further the educational mission of your university by making your photos available for research? Well, we have a solution. We are excited to introduce…
Have you been enjoying following all the “color our collections” posts from archives this week on Twitter? #ColorOurCollections is the hashtag to search and lots of great coloring opportunities have been going by. We thought it would be fun to participate, too. Here’s a few sketches of Alaskan buildings from…
Tips if you’re planning to do some research in our collections or in the Rare Books collection. This turned out longer than I intended, so here’s a list of topics at a glance. If your question isn’t listed here, please contact us! I’m not a university student or faculty member.…
The almost everything else post! We’ve shared our 2014-15 performance statistics in three previous posts: 1) Alaska’s Digital Archives, 2) Processing and description, and 3) Access. And here’s some of the many other things we do on a daily basis. Again, these are the stats for August 2014-August 2015, since…
Long overdue, sorry. I took a long overdue vacation. The third in our blog posts on our annual report for the academic year ending in August 2015 [ed note: fixed from 2014]. This one is probably the nearest and dearest to my heart: a look back at our reference numbers.…
