(This is Arlene). It’s not often I indulge my need to complain in quite such a public setting, but I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days working on additions to the Alaska’s Digital Archives and, well, I’ll say it, ContentDM is driving me nuts. Don’t get…
So I (Arlene) was writing an email this afternoon to set up a meeting and realized that I really dislike the term “Reading Room.” Where to start? First, too passive. People aren’t just reading, they’re researching. So I suggested Research Center to MC, who said that sounded like a whole…
Guest blogger: MC. Archives preserve and make available a variety of resources in a variety of mediums. People tend to associate archives with “old stuff.” Though “old stuff” is inadequate it does refer to the non-current nature of a majority of our records. So we do have ‘old stuff,’ but…
Some days it seems like the most efficient people around here are our student workers. And maybe that’s because we give them tasks with beginnings, middles, and ends, unlike the stuff we reserve for ourselves which seems pretty much permanently on-going. In the last week, we’ve had 2 students polish…
So UAA has an honest-to-goodness, real log cabin parked on the grounds of the Alaska State Fair. Apparently Matanuska-Susitna College has a cabin building course every so often and the cabin is the product of the 1982 class. (Photos coming later.) So we spent the day hanging out at the…
I (Arlene) inherited this from my mother. Periodically, I just need to rearrange furniture. And I’ve been thinking about the reading room for a long time. Long narrow tables, lined up in rows, backs to the window, facing the reference archivist. Was this really the most congenial/inviting format? Did the…
It doesn’t seem like a natural match, and after next Monday we might decide it isn’t, but MC & I (Arlene) have volunteered to spend Labor Day at the Alaska State Fair at the UAA booth promoting A&SC and maybe the Consortium Library too. We’ll take along some of our…
Some days you just have to dump all those waiting reports and documents to write and such and just spend a day moving stuff about. Today was that day. And it all started with the picturingUAA project. We’ve been putting things in on a collection by collection basis. So the…
COnservation OnLine, that is. This great public resource for matters conservation has been resurrected and made available online again. Go take a look! Click on Resource Center and there it is, about half-way down the page.
Last year we did a great exhibit called “Eye of the Beholder.” Well, not so much we, as everybody else who decided to do the really heavy lifting for us. Here’s the theory behind the exhibit: take a single photograph, ask people to do interpretation, modification, whatever they feel represents…
