In last week’s mail came a rather lavishly illustrated catalog of materials from a documents/photographs/artifacts dealer listing a number of Alaskana items for sale. One of them, a photographic print by Eric A. Hegg, caught my eye. Because we have a small collection of photographic prints from Eric A. Hegg…
From an unsolicited Facebook posting by a library colleague last night: Too much partying at the Archives Open House–I missed my bus. For those of you who missed the previous blog posting, we here at A&SC decided to celebrate Archives Month this year by holding an open house with AMIPA.…
Dear readers of our blog, We are inviting you – and anyone you know – to stop by our Open House at the Archives on Wednesday, October 6th from 4-6pm. October is Archives Month, and we’re celebrating by opening our doors to you, together with our neighbors, the Alaska Moving…
Guest blogger: Megan I have an abiding fondness for stereoviews. Anyone of my generation who grew up with their eyes pressed to a View-Master camera knows the sheer magic of looking through the viewfinder into a tiny, three-dimensional scene, every leaf and blade of grass picked out in perfect, near-real…
A lot of people have been asking me lately about collections and what happens to the embarrassing or maybe not-quite-ready-for-the-public-eye bits in them. And the verb that’s been used by a lot of them is sanitizing. The questions usually fall into the following two groups: Do we do it? Will…
An archivist’s work is never done. Or so it just seems some days. But occasionally projects do end and the one I’m referring to today is our Alan May Aleutian expeditions photographs project. Last year the Alaska State Library and the Institute for Museum and Library Services gave us funding…
Guest blogger: Megan I sometimes think of the tintype as the ugly duckling of nineteenth-century photo processes. Those that have made it intact to the twenty-first century are often battered, bent, or rusted, the image sometimes shot through with a fine constellation of scratches. Nevertheless, tintypes have a durability that…
I don’t usually like to talk about new collections that have just come in the door. That’s for a very good reason: usually there’s at least a little bit of lag time (depending on the size of the collection or how busy we are) between the receipt of the collection…
Guest blogger: Mariecris One of the aspects that I really enjoy about working at A&SC are the tours and workshops we provide to students, faculty, and community members. On Friday, June 18th, I had the opportunity to give a tour to four incoming freshman and their faculty mentor, Dr. Gabriel…
Guest blogger: Megan “What are these blue thingies?” That’s a question I’ve heard countless times from interns and volunteers processing photo collections. “Are they supposed to look that way?” Yep, they sure are. Those “blue thingies” are one of my favorite early photographic processes: cyanotypes. And they are indeed a…
