Eye of the Beholder 4

Call for Participation: Be a Co-Curator! Archives & Special Collections Eye of the Beholder 4: One Image, Many Perspectives October 3, 2011-? THE EXHIBIT: Archives & Special Collections is mounting an exhibit to demonstrate how a single item: this image in particular, could be used/interpreted/described in a variety of ways…
Preservation, Care, & Identification of Manuscripts and Photographs
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,…
Student asks super questions

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.…
I’m Going to College (Year 3)
The collection question
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…
New in the Archives: Olavi V. Kukkola papers

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…
Now that’s dedication
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…
Dusty and quiet? Riiiiight.
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…
if a photo is worth 1000 words, how much does the caption count for?

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.…