About "Preservica"
The Alaska Division of Libraries, Archives, and Museums holds digital collections in multiple locations. Some are stored in a digital preservation system called "Preservica." In some cases, such as some Alaska newspapers, items stored in Preservica are only available to researchers who visit our location in Juneau. In other cases, collections may be searched and viewed anywhere.
This guide is intended to help people search our digital collections in Preservica. If you don't find what you need in Preservica, you might try searching the following:
The basics
When you use the search box in our Digital Collections in Preservica, you search both descriptive information entered by librarians and archivists and full text of some textual materials like reports. As a result, searching by keyword can yield thousands of results.
These search tips can help you narrow down your search results.
While some terms are capitalized in the examples below, the system is not case sensitive; therefore, searching for Medicare will yield the same number of results as medicare.
Phrase searching
Enclose keywords in quotes to search by phrase.
Example: “Medicaid reform” looks for those terms in order, with no words in between, anywhere in both descriptive information and full text.
AND, OR
Connect keywords with AND & OR.
Example 1: Medicaid AND reform looks for those words in any order, and not necessarily one after the other, anywhere in both descriptive information and full text.
Example 2: Medicaid OR Medicare looks for either of those words anywhere in descriptive information or full text.
Parentheses
Use parentheses to group different keywords or phrases for more complex searching.
Example: (Medicaid OR Medicare) AND reform looks for either Medicaid or Medicare in the description or full text, and reform must be also present
Truncation
If you want to find all forms of a word, use an asterisk at the end.
Example: oyster and farm* will look for documents with the term oyster and any variation of farm (farming, farmer, farms, etc.) in the description or full text.
Limiting and filtering
WARNING: We’ve enabled several ways to limit or filter results, but be aware that these methods use descriptive information librarians and archivists enter, and not all items in the archives have descriptive information.
Filter by publication date
If you are certain you only want documents published within a certain date range, select +FILTER to the right of your search box, and add the beginning and ending date in the range. You can select from the calendar or enter dates in this format: yyyy-mm-dd.
Example: oyster and farm, with publication date limited to 2021-01-01 to 2024-12-31 yields 4 results.
Entering the publication date filter narrows down the search results from 76 items to 4 items.
Limit to “top level folder”
After conducting a search across all collections, you can further limit the results to any of these collections: Alaska State Archives, Alaska State Publications Digital Library, Historical Collections publications, or Federal publications. The latter two collections are very small.
Limit by publisher
While this limiter is enabled, some items in the collection do not have publishers entered, and a single publisher name may be entered in multiple ways because they may appear differently on items themselves. For example, the archive may contain entries with the publisher names “Division of Public Health” and “Alaska Department of Health, Division of Public Health”.
To get around this problem, try searching for an agency name as a phrase, along with other keywords.
Example: obesity AND “division of public health” returns over 300 results. Some of these do not have anything entered in the Publisher field yet, as they have not been fully cataloged.
