Today’s guest artist: Mariecris. Sometimes I like to think that archival research is like an archaeology dig. An archaeologist may find clues in maps, newspaper articles, books, historical documents, previous archaeological digs/discoveries to determine where would be a good place to dig. Sometimes they set up a grid on the…
Today’s guest artist: Mariecris. One of my favorite parts of collections are kodachrome slides. Kodachrome slides are brilliant Technicolor-like 35mm transparencies. Not only are they beautiful they have the reputation of lasting a very, very long time. In the photography world, that means a lot. Pictures fade, especially color photographs.…
Today’s guest artist: Nicole. The following are some of Nicole’s favorite excerpts from Edwin F. Glenn’s journal from the 1898 expedition through the Cook Inlet area. Lt. Glenn, while clearly writing his journal with the intent of compiling his formal military report later, occasionally lets a little of his sense…
Guest artist today: Kathy. Arlene’s mentioned in our blog that one of her staff members now lives in Stuttgart, Germany, well that would be me! It does make it difficult for me to make the “morning coffee” staff meetings, but Arlene’s great updates keep me in the daily loop. Life’s…
We learned today of the imminent demise of CoOL: Conservation OnLine. CoOL is a resource on conservation and preservation issues that has been hosted by Stanford University for many, many years. Want to know what a stone consolidant does? Go check CoOL. (I still don’t know, I never went and…
Most people assume–if they think about it at all–that the primary users of archival materials are historians. You could argue that easily, since archives generally hold non-current records and hence anyone researching there is wearing a historical hat of some sort. But professional historians or even amateur historians aren’t a…
Every once in a while when we get busy or it seems like projects are piling up, it’s nice to know that we will be hiring another archivist soon, hopefully this fall. Since we won’t be opening the position til sometime in August, this gives us a little time to…
One of our fairly regular reference requests goes like this: “I’m looking for a list of all the men who worked on the Alaska Highway.” One of the regular variants of that request goes like this: “My uncle/grandfather/dad/dad’s friend worked on the highway and I’d like to know where he…
If you count up all the archivists in Alaska, well, you’ll need more than just your fingers and toes but maybe not very much more. And it’s odd because for as many people who assume we’re all on first-name basis with each other, there’s probably as many people who assume…
Today I (Arlene) was working on rehousing a collection as I was working a shift on the reference desk. Rehousing is archives-talk for taking photographic slides out of carousels and other types of trays and placing them in polypropylene slide holder pages. Not only does it reduce the space the…
