it has never been easier to fill out the Census without leaving your house. Respond to the Census online at my2020census.gov, or over the phone at 1-844-330-2020.
The Juneau and Sitka buildings of the Division are compliant with State mandates pertaining to Alaska State Libraries, Archives, and Museums and plan to re-open in phases. For more information on COVID-19 health mandates and advisories, please visit https://covid19.alaska.gov/health-mandates/
Read on for specific reopening plans. We’re looking forward to seeing our communities in person again!
The Alaska State Libraries and State Archives will re-open to the public on June 23, 2020 by appointment only.
Library and Archives Research Center public hours at the APK:
Tuesday through Friday
12 noon to 4:00 p.m.
The facility will be closed on Friday July 3 in observance of Independence Day
To schedule your visit, please contact the appropriate section:
Alaska State Library at 907-465-2920
Alaska State Library Historical Collections 907-465-2925
Alaska State Archives at 907-465-2270
Visit our websites at https://archives.alaska.gov or https://library.alaska.gov to make an appointment online
Guidelines to ensure the safety of our staff and visitors:
The Alaska State Museum will re-open to the public on June 24, 2020 with a timed entry system and by reservation only. Please call the museum front desk at 907-465-2901 to schedule your visit. See admissions and public hours below.
Guidelines to ensure the safety of our staff and visitors:
Admissions: Public Hours:
General Adult- $7 Wednesday – Saturday
Senior (65 & older)- $6 12:00pm – 4:00pm
Youth (18 years & younger)- FREE
Please contact the museum front desk at (907) 465-2901 or email chelsea.kilgore@alaska.gov with questions regarding museum visitation and services.
The Sheldon Jackson Museum will re-open to the public on June 24, 2020 with a timed entry system and by reservation only. We will be open Wednesday through Saturday, from 12:00 noon to 4:00 p.m. Please call 907-747-8981 or email robert.hoffmann@alaska.gov to schedule your visit.
New guidelines to ensure the safety of our community:
Admissions:
General Adult - $5
Senior (65 & older) - $4
Youth (18 years & younger) – Free
As of May 2020, 23 libraries had deployed WhoFi wireless session counting services. 22 of these reported statistics for May. These libraries had 26,355 wireless sessions, or 850 sessions on average each day across those libraries. This usage represents a 30% increase from April.
WhoFi is offered free to public libraries under our statewide license. See more about what reporting is available from WhoFi by visiting our Getting Wireless Statistics page. If you are authorized to speak for your library and you’d like your library to join our statewide license, send an e-mail to Daniel Cornwall at Daniel.cornwall@alaska.gov.
We hope your public library will join us in demonstrating how much library internet is used across Alaska.
The staff of the Kenai Community Library, including Children’s Librarian James Adcox and Bethany McMilin have kicked off the first of nine video programs they will use to engage their young patrons in summer reading.
The first episode featured an archeologist, a talking skeleton and exploding mentos and soda. We were impressed by the production values and urge you to watch this and future episodes of the Jr. Explorers Club.
Have some creative way of reaching out by distance? Let us know?
As Alaska reopens, we wanted to highlight the Noel Wien Library in Fairbanks restarted offering public internet computers on Wednesday, 6/10/20. There are four time slots per day and the workstations are cleaned between uses. The library is continuing their curbside pickup service and virtual programming.
For more details, either visit the library’s web site or this article:
Noel Wien Library reopens computer services by appointment. By Sara Tewksbury. Webcenter11, 6/10/20.
We recently received an e-mail newsletter from the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks. They are actively planning for their public reopening. They will remain closed at least through 6/30/2020. In addition to their own planning, they are obligated to coordinate with the University. As UAMN Director Patrick Druckenmiller put it in his e-mail:
We do not have a reopening date set as of this writing and plan to remain closed at least until the end of June. When we get the go-ahead from the university to set a reopening date, we will publicize this broadly, along with a set of guidelines for our visitors to stay safe. Stay tuned for more soon!
In the meantime, UAMN continues to encourage people everywhere to visit their virtual museum. We wish UAMN well in their reopening efforts!
PC Magazine recently offered some data saving tips that might help you and your visitors:
How to Turn Off Autoplay Videos: Whether you want to avoid disturbing content or preserve bandwidth, here's how to turn off autoplay videos on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video. By Chandra Steele. PC Magazine, 6/8/2020.
From our new friends at Alaska Seeds of Change:
Alaska Seeds of Change is an Anchorage-based vocational program under the parent organization Alaska Behavioral Health (formerly known as Anchorage Community Mental Health Services) that works to support transition-aged youth (16-24) personally and professionally at its 8,000 square foot hydroponic greenhouse. In addition to providing job skills at its hydroponic greenhouse, Alaska Seeds of Change provides opportunities for youth both in its vocational program and the community to learn how to grow produce outside in Alaskan climates. These opportunities foster a sense of empowerment for youth to pursue their goals and become self-reliant as adults.
Alaska Seeds of Change also contributes to the local community by promoting economic development through sustainable urban agriculture. In an effort to increase economic development and sustainability within the state of Alaska, Alaska Seeds of Change is collaborating with Grace Johnston, several regional farms and greenhouses, and Alaskan food banks on the Seed Distribution Project. The primary goal of the Seed Distribution Project is to distribute seeds and starts to Alaskans living in rural communities, in order to increase both food security and resiliency within Alaskan communities.
Youth at Alaska Seeds of Change have been an integral part of the Seed Distribution Project by designing, filming, and editing instructional videos based on the skills and expertise they gained while working at Alaska Seeds of Change. The goal of these instructional videos is to provide virtual support for teaching Alaskans how to maintain their own gardens with the seeds and starts they were provided.
The gardening tutorials are available on the Alaska Seeds of Change Outside playlist on YouTube.
We encourage all Alaskans who engage with our tutorial videos to email our staff at lead@akseedsofchange.com for any unanswered questions, comments, or suggestions for future video content.
For more information about Alaska Seeds of Change or Alaska Behavioral Health, we invite you to visit our website at akseedsofchange.com. For more information about the Seed Distribution Project, we invite you to contact Grace Johnston at gjohnstonak@gmail.com.
Thank you in advance for distributing our video content across the state of Alaska! We are looking forward to working with you all to increase our state’s food security!
NASA recently created a section on their website called NASA at Home where you can find resources aimed at a general audience.
NASA at Home is divided into six sections:
These resources will likely remain useful long after the current pandemic is an unhappy memory. Whether your community is open or closed, we hope you’ll check out these resources.
An opportunity for your patrons, wherever they are. From our friends at the Space Science Institute:
Mars 2020: Follow Perseverance to Mars
Live Webcast: June 30 | 4pm EDT/2pm MDT/Noon ADT
The Perseverance Rover will launch this summer (July 17 – Aug. 5, 2020) and head to Jezero Crater, where it will land at the foot of a river delta which was clearly a lake at the time microbial life was flourishing on Earth.
The American Museum of Natural History’s Director of Astrovisualization, Carter Emmart, will lead us on an exploration of this exciting landing site as we fly over it together using OpenSpace, NASA-supported software. We will see why Jezero Crater was chosen and the features it has to offer for this latest in NASA’s series of Mars rovers to investigate past conditions which could have supported life.During the live webcast, library patrons will be able to interact with NASA Scientists by asking questions (using the chat feature) that relate to NASA’s 2020 Mars Mission.
This live OpenSpace webcast is brought to you by the STAR Library Network’s NASA@ My Library program in partnership with the Lunar and Planetary Institute , the American Library Association, and the American Museum of Natural History.
View The Live Webcast on June 30th!
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