[Mariecris:] When working the reference desk you never know what type of reference requests will come along. Some of them are pretty consistent: people doing research for a book/dissertation, requesting images for a documentary or exhibit, compiling family history etc. But every so often we get a request that completely throws…
Who knew that hieroglyphics existed as late as the 1970s? I (Mariecris) made this discovery when looking through a collection with a donor. She was describing all the files she would deposit in the archives. One of the files she showed me was filled with papers covered in hieroglyphics. That…
… eludes me (Nicole) when it comes to blog entries. It’s true. Asked to produce a blog entry (or *gasp* two!) and I become a muted shadow of my former chatty self. What topic to chose, how to present it, and how to write it clearly and succinctly all combine…
The curse is, we’re all having too much fun. (Except Kathy who was forced into a work stoppage today because of computer issues and was forced to go bowling in lieu of working for us). We’re working on the upcoming tenure-track faculty archivist recruitment, answering great reference requests, captioning in-house…
A&SC has been working on a number of department-wide tasks lately, but two have come together in an interesting way. Task one is to write a report on our activities over the past year and our goals for the next. That’s due at a library meeting the first week of…
At a bit of a loss for a current blog entry today, I (Arlene) decided to tell one of my favorite stories from working here. I’ve read (Terry Pratchett) that opera works on the catastrophe curve: everything that could go wrong miraculously fails to do so. We had one of…
Deborah Tharp is one of our researchers who has been utilizing photographs in our collection in some creative ways. Below is a composite photograph she created using images from our National Geographic Society Katmai Expeditions photograph collection. The photographs she used can be found on the Alaska Digital Archives, uaa-hmc-0186-volume3-1831…
Today I (Arlene) finished description to a collection we received a couple of months ago. Having this description finished and posted on our website basically makes the collection available to our research audience. It’s a small collection, but it’s important, but maybe not for the reasons you might think.…
Recently we were offered a Bunch of Boxes, gently used, from another archival facility in town. They’d emptied them out and simply didn’t have the storage space to keep them on the off chance that they might need them again some day. So the archivists gave us a call and…
[Note from September 2018: Due to a cost increase for PicturingUAA, all images that were once available on PicturingUAA have been moved to Alaska’s Digital Archives. We also have many more images within our physical holdings. Please contact us if you have any questions.] Periodically we get requests from people…
