18 Days until January 21, 2020 - Census 2020 Enumeration of Remote Alaska begins in Toksook Bay
89 Days until April 1, 2020 – 2020 Census Day
Resources:
Happy first Friday of a new decade! The staff of the Division of Libraries, Archives and Museums wish all of you a happy and productive 2020.
The Alaska State Museum is recruiting graduate student interns to work at three small Alaska museums during the summer of 2020. These paid internships will focus on collections management activities. Interns should be enrolled in museum studies programs or affiliated graduate degree programs.
Interns will begin in late May or early June, 2020. They will receive a $4500 stipend, free housing, and reimbursement for the cost of air fare to the host communities. For more information, please visit https://lam.alaska.gov/museum-resources/internships.
Applicants should send a cover letter, resume, and the names and contact information for two professional references to anjuli.grantham@alaska.gov by January 17, 2020.
The Sheldon Jackson Museum December Artifact of the Month is a pair of Yup'ik dance fans (SJ-II-S-146). According to files, these dance fans along with a dance headband made with ribbon, glass beads, wolf and beaver fur (SJ-II-S-149) were purchased at "Winter Festival at Bethel" and received by Alice Postell in February 1973. The set of dance fans was purchased for just $12.
The Juneau Public Libraries was one of 50 libraries chosen by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association (ALA) to host Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibition that examines the motives, pressures and fears that shaped Americans’ responses to Nazism, war and genocide in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.
According to the press release issued by ALA:
Drawing on a remarkable collection of primary sources from the 1930s and ’40s, the exhibition focuses on the stories of individuals and groups of Americans who took action in response to Nazism. It will challenge visitors to consider the responsibilities and obstacles faced by individuals — from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to ordinary Americans — who made difficult choices, sought to effect change, and, in a few cases, took significant risks to help victims of Nazism even as rescue never became a government priority.
In addition to the traveling exhibition on loan, the participating libraries will receive a $2,000 cash grant to support public programs. One library staff member will also have expenses paid to attend an orientation workshop at the Museum.
As of this writing, the dates that the exhibit will be in Juneau have not been set. We look forward to seeing this exhibit when it gets here.
On 12/23/2019 KBBI reported that Jennifer Gibbons recently assumed the duties of Executive Director of Homer’s Pratt Museum. The article describes Ms. Gibbons as having a degree in art history and a lifelong interest in museums and the humanities. Over the next several months she plans to focus on “expanding the museum’s programming and getting to know the community, museum partners and potential partners.” We hope you will join us in Ms. Gibbons well in her new role.
From the Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s Public Domain Day 2020 post:
On January 1, 2020, works from 1924 will enter the US public domain, where they will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee. These works include George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, silent films by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and books such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.
Where can you find these new public domain materials and what can you do with them? The Center has these thoughts:
The Internet Archive will add books, movies, music, and more to its online library. HathiTrust will make tens of thousands of titles from 1924 available in its digital library. Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of showing only snippet views or authorized previews. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can afford to publicly perform the music. Educators and historians can share the full cultural record. Creators can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs.
If you have a favorite new member of the Public Domain, drop us a line and tell us about it.
The Government Publishing Office is offering the following webinars of possible interest to library staff and patrons in January:
Last month the New York Times ran a series called “One Nation, Tracked” that provided detail on how legally obtained phone location data could be and has been used to destroy privacy. The series has started conversations around on what do with this knowledge.
The first article, titled “Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy” and published 12/19/2019, introduced readers to what the Times had done with a smallish data set provided to them by whistleblowers in the data industry:
After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.
One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.
If you lived in one of the cities the dataset covers and use apps that share your location — anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers — you could be in there, too.
If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again.
The data provided to the Times came from one of many location data companies who gather precise location data from apps on your phone. Arguably this isn’t just an invasion of privacy, but potentially a national security risk.
We think the whole series is worth reading and pondering. Then consider taking some steps to better protect your privacy. You likely cannot prevent all tracking, but you can reduce your risk.
National Library Week will be celebrated across the country from 4/19-4/25/2020. The American Library Association (ALA) posted information, ideas and tools to use on their National Library Week page. Tools include sample social media posts, PSA scripts, customizable print ads and more.
Last month we asked people to weigh in on whether publishing our list of “events and observances” for the next month was useful to you. We got four responses that agreed that this feature was useful. Neither a ringing endorsement nor exactly a rejection. So we will continue the feature though we will place it at the very end of an issue so it doesn’t take prime real estate on these blog posts.
Here are events and observances for February that appear interesting either to Alaska in general or to libraries, archives and museums in particular:
Month long observances
Week long observances
Specific day observances
Conferences
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