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…
Guest blogger: Mariecris. The processing of the Alice E. Brown papers is close to an end. I will soon reach the destination of a fully processed collection. But to add a little extra excitement to my journey, I’ve talked with Arlene and I am going to create a record of…
Guest blogger: Mariecris. I have been steadily working through the Alice Brown papers and discovered that we share a common characteristic; we doodle when taking notes. Amidst Alice Brown’s handwritten notes are doodles she did during meetings. These doodles range from simple boxes she drew around notes she wrote to…
All right, I’ll ‘fess up. Our whole Eye of the Beholder exhibit thing? Was Arlene being lazy. In early September 2008, when I asked if we should do something for Archives Month in October, Mariecris suggested an exhibit. The problem was, and is, that exhibits are very time consuming and…
