February was a busy month for the Archives. In addition to describing several new collections and adding photos from a couple other collections to Alaska’s Digital Archives, we set up a new exhibit of Fur Rondy photographs and started a crowdsourcing project to transcribe some of our audio recordings. The…
We know there’s a lot of Ruben Gaines fans out there. We hear from them occasionally. Did you know that we have a bunch of his broadcast recordings? Are you wondering who Ruben Gaines was? He came to Alaska in 1946 and originally worked as a radio broadcaster in Fairbanks,…
Happy Friday and happy last day of January. This month we added several new collections and additions to existing collections, as well as putting photos from three of our collections online. Gwen engaged in community outreach on behalf of the Archives with a presentation to the Pioneers of Alaska. Newly…
Some of you may recall the earthquake we had in November 2018. Thankfully the archives didn’t suffer too much damage. Boxes off of shelves, but thankfully the boxes did their great protective job of the contents and the archival materials were fine, even if about 200 boxes had to be…
December events: Dr. Jennifer Stone of the UAA English department held her A476: History of English Language student posters presentations in the Archives. The students shared posters and presented on their research topics, many of which were based on documents from the Archives holdings. Above: Students from Professor Stone’s class…
Research round-up: Our researchers in November included UAA students, Anchorage community members, Alaskans, a variety of people from across the United States, and a professor visiting from Norway. Topics of research included the performing arts in Anchorage, maritime history, Arctic environmental science and politics, and images requested for use in…
This month we described two new collections and added 86 new items to Alaska’s Digital Archives, in addition to participating in UAA’a STEM Day. Behind the scenes, we’ve been implementing new digital preservation policies and procedures. Newly described collections: HMC-1342: Anne D. Pasch papers; 1952-2014. Primarily slides of an Alaskan…
September was our first month with reduced hours. If you’re wondering why we have reduced access hours, it’s because one of our archivists left in late August and several years of University budget cuts have meant a hiring freeze for the Consortium Library. We hope that eventually we’ll be able…
I moved to Alaska six years ago to be an archivist at the UAA/APU Archives and Special Collections. It was my first professional archives job. And it is bittersweet that I am now leaving to be an archivist at Kansas State University. In the six years since I’ve been here,…
For years we (the archivists) had grappled with what to do with our electronic records. But in 2018 a couple of things happened that made us realize we really needed to make headway. Up until then, our digitized content was saved onto what we called “scribe drives” which were server…
