We’re used to seeing items from our collections show up in footnotes in scholarly articles, that sort of thing. But this weekend we had the pleasant experience of seeing a thank you to us (Nicole, Mariecris, & Arlene) show up in a program from a play! A local theatre, Cyrano’s,…
It’s coming up on Alaska Civil Rights/Martin Luther King Jr. Day and once again the question has reappeared. Archivists, librarians, and historians around the state are being asked: “Where do I find the text of Elizabeth Peratrovich’s speech to the Legislature?” Here’s my standard answer: “It doesn’t exist.” Let me…
Since we’ve been a little quiet on the blog of late, just a quick update. Here’s been the week at A&SC. Monday: Megan Friedel, our new archivist, started work. We did a tour of the building, requested a university email account, she obtained her University ID card, and we got…
Since it’s a quiet day and we’re about to be closed for a little over a week for the holidays, here’s a piece of absurdity to carry you through. From a letter from Fred Wildon Fickett to his fiancee Nellie Lord. 1885 March 11. Fickett was about to leave on…
Being an archivist means always having something new to learn. This is Arlene. I’ve been with A&SC for just over 7 years now. So I’ve got a fairly good grasp on what collections we have–maybe not item or folder level–but it’s rare anymore that I run into a collection where…
Nicole has been working on a grant project (Thanks IMLS & the Alaska State Library) to put a bunch of images from the Alan May diaries online. Alan May was an amateur anthropologist who went along on three of Ales Hrdlicka’s Aleutian expeditions between 1936 and 1938. Alan wrote near-daily…
We’re currently in the middle of a Rare Books shift. In library lingo, that means we’re shifting the books from one place to another. Or in this case, to another section of the same shelving. This is not glamorous work. Some of these books are shedding dust, paper bits, and…
The Library has these exhibit cases. We’ve been doing what we can to say that because the exhibit cases used to belong to A&SC but they’re not all that practical for most of the exhibits that we do these days. The cases are flat cases so you mostly have to…
So I (Arlene) am known around the dept as the go-to woman for deciphering handwriting. Which is rather amusing when you consider my own cursive looks like it was done by a particularly uncoordinated third-grader. Which should be no surprise since that’s about the last time I wrote in cursive…
It seems so odd for an archivist to feel as if s/he is unable to communicate. After all, we’re all about records and documents and records and documents are all about information and the transference of information. But since Sunday afternoon, the UAA webservers have more or less been down. …
