it has never been easier to fill out the Census without leaving your house. Stay home and respond to the Census online at my2020census.gov, or over the phone at 1-844-330-2020.
As of this writing the Census Bureau has paused field operations. So we need everyone with a phone or internet connection to count themselves!
As of this writing (afternoon of 4/6/20), libraries, archives and museums across Alaska remain closed to the public until further notice per Health Mandate 2. These institutions are encouraged to “continue to serve the public through telephone, web, and other modes that preserve the highest degree of social distancing possible.”
Per Health Mandate 8, Public and private schools are closed to students through May 1, 2020. Students will receive instruction through distance delivery methods. All after school activities will be suspended during this time.
For a list of all the current Health Mandates in force, visit the State’s COVID-19 Health Mandates page.
In-person First Friday openings at the APK in Juneau are temporarily postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, on 4/3/2020, the Alaska State Museum participated in Virtual First Friday, organized by the Juneau Arts & Humanities Council. Sara Tabbert’s exhibit Lowlands was made available online at 4:30pm on the Alaska State Museum’s website, lam.alaska.gov/sara-tabbert-lowlands. For more images of the artist’s work visit, www.saratabbert.com/lowlands.
Fairbanks-based artist Sara Tabbert creates woodblock prints, carved panels, and sculptures that reveal often overlooked subjects and environments. Lowlands highlights new sculptural skills and techniques and explores the strange and beautiful landscapes of interior Alaska.
Tabbert gave a lecture at the Alaska State Museum on Friday, February 7. The lecture was recorded for later broadcast by 360North in partnership with our local radio station KTOO. It is also available on 360North’s YouTube Channel.
In addition to Tabbert’s work at the Alaska State Museum, the Alaska State Archives had two virtual events related to their Women of Alaska exhibit. Find links to these and exhibits from other institutions that went digital for Juneau’s April 2020 First Friday.
Is your town doing a digital/virtual First Friday? Please send us your link!
In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of changes to SLED lately. Please check them out and share with your users!
Have suggestions for SLED?? Email Freya at freya.anderson@alaska.gov.
The E-rate Form 471 application deadline has been extended and is now April 29, 2020. E-rate provides discounts on Internet bills and library infrastructure. If you have questions or need assistance contact valerie.oliver@alaska.gov.
If you’ve spent any time on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen Image text. It’s a picture of words. Because it’s a picture, the text can’t be copied and pasted. Worse, it means nothing at all to a screen reader. So image text doesn’t exist for people with sight issues. And fewer people will share that quote or announcement if they can’t copy and paste into an e-mail.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Check out this blog post found for us by our webmaster:
Quick Tip: How to Convert Image Text to Text By Deborah Edwards-Onoro, 3/23/2020
It explains how to use Google Docs to quickly and easily convert pictures with text into text to make them useful to everyone.
This trick is for image text you find. For stuff you create, consider just using words, rather than forcing them into a picture. It’s more useful that way.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 27, 2020) — The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will receive $75 million in supplemental funding to assist cultural institutions affected by the coronavirus as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act economic stabilization plan appropriated by the U.S. Congress and signed into law today by President Donald J. Trump.
As detailed in the Supplemental Funding FAQ on the NEH website, this emergency funding will support at-risk humanities positions and projects at museums, libraries and archives, historic sites, colleges and universities, and other cultural nonprofits that have been financially impacted by the coronavirus. Anchoring the domestic creative economy, museums and historic sites are reporting losses of $1 billion a month as education programs, exhibitions, festivals, and other events have been canceled.
Approximately 40 percent of the appropriation, or $30 million, will go directly to the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils to support local cultural nonprofits and educational programming. Through the regranting of federal support, the councils reach an estimated annual audience of 137 million people across the world.
NEH and its national humanities partners will work together to contextualize the global impact of the coronavirus in relation to other cataclysmic events, such as plagues, natural disasters, and world wars that significantly altered human society.
The $75 million supplemental funding is in addition to NEH’s FY20 appropriation of $162.25 million.
The citizen science organization Zooniverse recently posted a list of resources for using Zooniverse projects in the classroom – in-person or virtual. The list is divided into two sections: “For 5-12 year olds” and “For teens and adults.”
Example resource in “For 5-12 year olds”:
Example resource in “For teens and adults”:
KTUU TV in Anchorage recently had a story titled Alaska Zoo and others are going digital to keep you safe at home. We’ve collected a few of the underlying video links for your pleasure and education.:
Like so many institutions across Alaska, the University of the North closed its doors to help us #flattenthecurve of COVID-19. But, as Museum Director Patrick Druckenmiller explained in a 3/27/2020 e-mail to their mailing list, it doesn’t mean the Museum cannot continue to inform and educate:
Beginning auspiciously on Friday, March 13, UAMN closed its doors to the public. UAMN is but a single cog in a much larger wheel of museums and science centers that ceased their physical public operations in order to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. However, that does not mean our educational, research and curation activities have stopped.
With change comes opportunity. While we cannot (at least temporarily) share our collections and outreach activities face-to-face, we can learn to adapt and remain engaged virtually. Last week, the museum partnered with the Interior Alaska District Science Fair to provide local students a platform for sharing their work and community organizations the opportunity to recognize them with awards. The museum's education team is planning virtual events and sharing existing and new content online. Stay up to date at our new webpage: www.uaf.edu/museum/virtualmuseum.
The Virtual Museum page is divided into the following sections:
If your institution is featuring virtual exhibits, tours or other services you are maintaining while closed to the public, please drop us a line.
Announcement of a 12-minute archived webcast from our friends at the Government Publishing Office (GPO):
A webcast, "Digital Collections at the National Forest Service Library," is now available for viewing.
- Duration: 12 minutes
- Speaker: Crystal Falconer, Technical Information Specialist, Forest Service, National Forest Service Library
- Learning outcomes: Learn about the National Forest Service’s Digital Collections at the National Forest Service Library digitization project, from the planning to completion phase. The focus of the Digital Collections is on rare Forest Service materials that are not digitized elsewhere or otherwise available on TreeSearch, another Forest Service product that shares free, full text research by Forest Service employees. The Digital Collections contain documents related to National Forests, Forest Service history, Forest Service research, photos (mostly historic), and oral histories of Forest Service employees. Subjects found in the Digital Collections site include: firefighting, entomology, forest health, forestry, timber management, forest management, forest products, flora and fauna, land reclamation, and much more.
No prerequisite knowledge is required, and GPO encourages all to share and post these brief educational webcasts on your web pages and social media.
We wanted to share a Facebook post from our parent agency that shows you how to make a protective mask at home with a sewing machine:
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