Just a few weeks ago, I had the great fortune to travel to Nome, Alaska with members of the Alaska State Historic Records Advisory Board (ASHRAB) to help teach a full-day workshop on caring for archival records. The whole experience was wonderful. From the moment we got off the plane,…
The archives is blessed to have the aid of the Consortium Library’s fine student workers. Just by searching our blog you can see the multiple projects that students have helped make possible. This blog is to talk about one student in particular, Ksenia Polikakhina. Our archives vault is getting full.…
This was the third year that Archives and Special Collections has participated in “I’m Going to College,” a day of classes and workshops for fifth and sixth graders held at UAA to give them a taste of what college is like. Mariecris Gatlabayan had taught our portion of the workshops…
One of the regular questions we get is “what do you collect?” That’s not always an easy question to answer! Sometimes the answer is: it depends. For a while now, though, we’ve been talking about formalizing our collection policy for A&SC. Or at least putting it into some sort of…
Guest blogger: Al-Amin Smith, HIST 497 independent study student The Olavi V. Kukkola papers is a new collection at Archives and Special Collections that consists of Kukkola’s professional papers, engineering schematics, a developmental proposal, a technical diary, and several photos of his campsite. The subject of the collection is the…
This isn’t an April Fools Day joke, but in the spirit of the day… We had a researcher in recently trying to track down some photographs that appeared in a publication by William Laughlin. We have his professional papers. Unfortunately, the images the researcher wanted weren’t in the described part…
It’s not been a quiet week here in A&SC! In fact, at one point yesterday I think our research area was probably the noisiest room in the library. Lots of people having some great discussions about collections, research, and archival practice. Since it’s been a while since we’ve updated you…
When teaching archival research methods, one of the things we frequently talk about is assessing the value, the authenticity of a document. Nothing high end, necessarily, no need to pull out the electron microscopes, but using internal or external evidence to assess the value of the information in the document.…
Often when promoting A&SC’s resources to faculty or students I’ll say something like “There’s not a topic taught at this university that we can’t provide archival material to support. Well, except maybe math.” Hokey, I know. Occasionally it gets a laugh. I usually also follow that up with an explanation…
In my office is a framed print of one word: “Exhale.” It’s not that I have it as a regular reminder, but sometimes… 2010 was one of those sometimes for us here at the Archives. A very busy year. And since I forgot to breathe and exhale a few times,…
