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  • Division facilities will be closed Dec. 25 and Jan. 1.

Friday Bulletin: Issues

December 18, 2020

by Daniel Cornwall on 2020-12-19T11:41:17-09:00 | 0 Comments

State of Alaska COVID-19 information

BrainPop: Today's featured SLED resource

BrainPop: Short animated films on science, social studies, English, math, engineering & tech, health and arts and music. Students may also take quizzes, do activities and view related videos.

News from the Division

Happy Holidays from the Division, Next Bulletin 1/15/21

Alaska is a state of great diversity and we at the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums wish you the best of this holiday season, no matter what holiday brings you joy and hope during this season of winter darkness.

The Friday Bulletin is scheduled to be published on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of each month. Since the first Friday of January 2021 is New Year's day, we won't be publishing another Friday Bulletin until 1/15/2021. We hope you have a great New Year's and may 2021 be the year we wave goodbye to Coronavirus and greet our visitors with open arms the coming summer and fall.

Get Prepared!: Preparing Alaska's Cultural Organizations (PACO) for Emergencies

Five coaches for PACO.

Preparing Alaska’s Cultural Organizations for Emergencies is a new training program geared to elevating the emergency preparedness and disaster response capacity of Alaska’s collecting institutions. There will be three cohorts of participants over the next year; recruitment is currently open for participants in the first cohort. Learn more about this rare training opportunity at lam.alaska.gov/pacoinfo or by watching the informational webinar.

News from L.A.M.S in Alaska

Kodiak History Museum recognized for Distinguished Service to the Humanities

The Kodiak History Museum was a 2020 winner of the Governor's Arts and Humanities Awards, an annual partnership between the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation, and the Office of the Governor to recognize and honor noteworthy contributions to the arts and humanities in Alaska.

According to the awards website, the Kodiak History Museum was honored for Distinguished Service to the Humanities:

The Kodiak History Museum (KHM), known until 2019 as the Baranov Museum, serves as an essential and beloved community resource dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and sharing the full breadth of the history of the Kodiak archipelago. KHM is leading the way in decolonizing small museums and has proven to be a catalyst of change in Kodiak, strengthening community by forging connections between people across race, class, and cultural divides.

Additional information on this award can be found in the KMXT radio story Kodiak History Museum wins award for service to the humanities in community by Dylan Simard, December 16, 2020.

Need new books? Wish upon a list

We recently saw this announcement from the Gustavus Public Library and thought it was an interesting way to get users directly involved in collection development, as well as drawing on the reserves of good will found this time of year:

The holidays are around the corner, and we're hoping to deck the shelves with lots of new resources for our community. If it's within your means, consider purchasing something from our wish list, or check with us about donating other materials. These items will directly benefit people in our community, and now more than ever people are relying on the library for information and entertainment to get through the winter.

Our 2020 Holiday Wish List can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1QWZ5HBD8EICN/ref=hz_ls_biz_ex

These are just a few of the materials we think would be used by the community, so let us know if you have other ideas. We've used Amazon to create the list for ease of sharing, but feel free to purchase items from other vendors, and let us know so we can check things off!

If you have a wish list or some other way of engaging your patrons in collection development, we'd love to hear about it.

Teacher resources from Alutiiq Museum

A number of libraries, archives and museums have many resources available for teachers and other educators. Today we'd like to highlight a mix of physical and virtual resources from the Alutiiq Museum's teachers page.

This page features a Teacher's Resource Guideand links to the following areas:

  • Tours - Mostly for planning a physical visit. Does contain virtual walkthrough of the entire museum.
  • Exhibits - Description of physical exhibits and links to a few virtual one.
  • Gallery activities - Ways to enrich your in-person visits when available.
  • Culture bearers - Advice on working with Culture bearers in a respectful and beneficial way. Appears focused on in-person experiences.
  • Educational Boxes - Theme boxes of Alutiiq hands-on activities. The museum will ship. They pay the outbound shipping, the borrower pays to ship back to the museum.
  • Collections - Descriptions of in-museum-use collections along with an online contemporary artwork gallery.
  • Crafts - Notices of future in-person crafting programs, along with instructional videos and downloadable projects.
  • Publications - Digital publications, some for children, made available by the Museum.
  • Alutiiq Online - Directory of resources to help you connect with Alutiiq culture, language and history.

If your library, archives or museum has a resource page for educators, we would love to hear from you!

Free to all: Alaska Historical Society 2020 Conference Recordings

The Alaska Historical Society recently announced that all the presentations from 2020 virtual conference are now available online.

LAM's own Anjuli Grantham, Curator of Statewide Services for the Alaska State Museum participated in two panels: Women’s Suffrage and Alaska Canneries. Joining Anjuli on the Women's Suffrage panel was Division alum Sue Sherif who has remained active in Alaska history activities since retiring from the Alaska State Library as Head of Library Development.

Other Announcements

Apply by 1/31/2021: Opportunity to archive local history with Archive-IT

The Internet Archive, with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, invites public libraries in the United States and cultural heritage organizations in U.S. territories to apply to join its Community History Web Archiving program.

Apply by January 31st, 2021 to join a diverse network of 150+ public libraries and librarians who are:

  • Documenting local history by saving web-published sites, stories and community engagement on the web.
  • Growing their professional skills and increasing institutional technical capacity by engaging in a supportive network of peer organizations pursuing this work.
  • Building a public understanding of web archiving as a practice and its importance to preserving 21st century community history and underrepresented voices.

Current Community Webs cohort members have created nearly 300 publicly available local history web archive collections, including:

  • 28 Community Webs members have created collections related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s “Novel Coronavirus COVID-19” collection which focuses on “the African diasporan experiences of COVID-19 including racial disparities in health outcomes and access, the impact on Black-owned businesses, and cultural production.”
  • Kansas City Public Library has created an “Arts & Culture” collection documenting “Kansas City's thriving Arts community.”
  • Sonoma County Public Library’s “North Bay Fires, 2017” collection documenting when “devastating firestorms swept through Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino Counties” and part of their “Sonoma Responds: Community Memory Archive.”

Benefits of participation in Community Webs include:

  • A three-year subscription to the Archive-It web archiving service.
  • Funding to support local outreach, public programming, and community collaborations as well as travel to a full-day Community Webs National Symposium (projected for 2021 and in 2022) and other professional development opportunities.
  • Specific training and educational resources provided by professional staff.
  • Membership in an active and diverse community of public librarians across the country.
  • Options to increase access (and discoverability) to collections via hubs, such as DPLA.

Apply any time before 11:59PM Eastern on January 31st, 2021.

Please feel free to contact commwebsinfo@archive.org with any questions you might have as you are considering participating in the program.

Primary Sources Online: Papers of Presidents from Washington to Coolidge

From our friends at the Library of Congress:

The Library of Congress has completed a more than two decade-long initiative to digitize the papers of nearly two dozen early presidents. The Library holds the papers of 23 presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, all of which have been digitized and are now available online.

The collections include some of the nation’s most treasured documents, including George Washington’s commission as commander in chief of the American army and his first inaugural address; Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence; and Abraham Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses, along with many others.

The digitized presidential collections offer a robust set of primary resources and easy access for researchers, educators and students studying America’s early presidents.

Save the Date: Perseverance Rover Landing 2/18/2021

From our friends at the STARnet

Perseverance will touch down on Mars on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at approximately 11:30 a.m. AkST (3:30 p.m. EST).

Landing on Mars is challenging. Only about 40 percent of the missions ever sent to Mars – by any space agency - have been successful. Perseverance is only the fifth rover to attempt landing on Mars. Will your library's patrons be watching? Tune in to NASA's Watch Online page for viewing information.

Mission Overview Video | NASA's Landing Toolkit

Meet 3D animals with Google Search

Want to explore Augmented Reality (AR) with your phone? Just need a sight some of something fuzzy or fun to get you through the long nights? Google Search is now offering the opporunity to "meet" over 50 animals that you can view in 3D and even put in your spaces for a camera or tablet to view. I chose to put a hippo outside my door:

AR hippo on apartment balcony

For background and detailed instructions, read the 12/14/2020 PC Magazine article Google Search lets you cozy up with more than 50 new AR animals. by. Stephanie Mlot.

American Indians in Children's Literature's list of Best Books of 2020

The blog American Indians in Children's Literature recently announced their Best Books of 2020. Their listing of books by Native Writers or Illustrators is divided into the following categories:

  • Comics and Graphic Novels
  • Board Books
  • Picture Books
  • For Middle Grades
  • For High School
  • Cross-Over Books (Written for adults; appeal to young adults)

In introducing this list, the blog authors Dr. Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo, and Dr. Jean Mendoza, state that these books aren't just for children:

That said, below is AICL's list of Best Books published in 2020. Books are arranged by age of reader but any book in any category can--and should be--read by every reader. Teens and adults can gain tremendously by studying the words and illustrations in a picture book and you can share content of middle or young adult books with younger children.

If you would like to put more Native American authors into your reading list for 2021, Check out the Read Native challenge from the American Indian Library Association. Hat tip to Valarie Kingsland of the Seward Public Library for alerting us to both of these items.


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