Notable Dates:
Resources:
The March 2020 issue of Alaska State Library Continuing Education Newsletter (CE NEWS) focuses on the current COVID-19/Coronavirus situation. Some of the resources are designed for libraries but ought to be helpful to archives and museums as well. The issue contains a Public Library Epidemic and Public Emergency template. The template was created by Michael Davis, Director of Camden County Library in Missouri and is based on CDC guidelines for businesses with concepts added from other materials produced by libraries.
The CE NEWS contains much valuable information even in non-emergency times and we encourage you to check out the newsletter archive and consider subscribing.
Last month our webmaster and leader of Division web accessibility efforts Amy Carney earned an important certification - Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA). Here is the explanation of the CPWA from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) email giving Amy the good news:
We are pleased to present to you the most highly regarded designation IAAP has to offer, the Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA). Your hard work, dedication, and experience help IAAP establish an internationally recognized credential demonstrating the skills and expertise required to represent accessibility core competencies, how to meet needs to ensure equal access to people with disabilities (CPACC), and the technical skills of a web accessibility specialist (WAS). Creating this highly respected designation of professionalism supports and complements the work each of you pursues individually and the strategic goals of IAAP. We look forward to seeing more of your colleagues joining the level of commitment you represent in what we hope will become a highly sought-after credential and noted mark of expertise.
The IAAP CPWA designation is awarded only to those who have achieved and support both our CPACC and WAS certification programs.
The IAAP CPACC program aspires to the following goals for accessibility certification:
- To define what accessibility professionals are expected to know.
- To increase the quality and consistency of the work performed by accessibility professionals.
- To provide accessibility professionals with a credential as evidence of their commitment to the accessibility field, and of their competence within the field.
- To provide employers, the accessibility community, and the public with a metric to measure and assess the accessibility competence of current and prospective employees.
- To provide colleges, universities, and vocational programs with clear educational outcomes and a curriculum outline for teaching accessibility.
- To strengthen the community of practice among accessibility professionals.
The IAAP WAS program aspires to the following goals for the web accessibility specialist designation:
- To define an objectively verified level of knowledge which intermediate web accessibility professionals are expected to know based on WCAG 2.0 standards.
- To provide web accessibility professionals with a credential as evidence of their understanding of writing, identifying, and remediating accessibility issues.
- To provide employers, the accessibility community, and the public with a metric to measure and assess the ability to express knowledge and contextual importance of web accessibility for current and prospective employees.
- To strengthen the community of practice among web accessibility professionals.
We are thrilled with Amy’s accomplishment and hope you will join us in congratulating her.
Between 3/12 and 3/20, invitations to participate in the 2020 Census will start arriving in households across the country. In preparation for this, the State Library hosted a webinar with Barb Miranda, Partnership Specialist with the US Census bureau to walk people through the online response form that will become active on the 3/12. We have posted the webinar video to our Division’s YouTube Channel.
A reminder that the State Library is still lending NASA @ My Library kits to libraries. Visit our project page to borrow one of these kits:
Kit 1: Sun-Earth-Moon Connection
This kit contains a facilitation guide and items to do the following activities:
In addition it has these additional items:
Kit 2: Be a NASA Detective - Expanding Your Senses
This kit contains a facilitation guide and items to do the following activities:
In addition, this kit features the following books:
Some exciting news from our friends at SHI:
The University of Alaska Southeast (UAS), in partnership with Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI), will offer a new Associate of Arts (AA) degree with an emphasis in Northwest Coast arts this fall.
The undergraduate program, which will be offered at the university’s Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka campuses and through e-learning courses, is part of a larger effort to establish a four-year art degree through UAS and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in New Mexico.
The program will require students to complete courses in Alaska Native studies, Indigenous performing arts and a language class on beginning Tlingit, Haida or Tsimshian, as well as Northwest Coast design, art history and culture, art theory and practice, and career development for artists.
The program includes courses on fiber arts spinning, basketry, tool making, carving, and woolen weaving among other things.
For more information, see SHI’s 3/2/2020 press release.
We’ve highlighted any number of crowdsourcing projects here in the Friday Bulletin. Today we celebrate a project in Alaska. The Archives and Special Collections at the UAA/APU Consortium Library recently announced an invitation for remote volunteers to transcribe Ruben Gaines recordings. Who’s Ruben Gaines? From the blog post:
He came to Alaska in 1946 and originally worked as a radio broadcaster in Fairbanks, but in 1950 he moved to Anchorage and spent many years on the airwaves in Anchorage. He often did whimsical short pieces, both fictional and non-fictional, on a variety of subjects. He was the Alaska Poet Laureate from 1973 to 1978, too. Even people in Alaska who haven’t heard of Ruben have probably heard of one of his most famous characters: Chilkoot Charlie (the Spenard bar is named after the character.
As of this writing there were 226 clips on Alaska’s Digital Archives from the Ruben Gaines collection. For more information about the project and how you can participate, visit Are you a Ruben Gaines fan? Would you like to help us out? (2/3/2020).
Join Film Archivist Angela Schmidt and Archivist Rachel Cohen as they use YouTube to tour you around the UAF Rasmuson Library’s Alaska Polar & Regions Collection & Archives in a video that was recorded on 2/14/2020. Public and staff areas are shown, along with highlights from the collection.
We feature the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak a lot in this newsletter. For good reason – not only are they doing interesting things nearly every month, they have us on their press release list so we’re in a position to share their work.
Last week we got news of their latest project:
To assist Alutiiq families with the preservation of their paper photographs the Alutiiq Museum is leading a Community Photo Archive project. In the coming months, museum staff members will work with tribal councils and community members to identify Alutiiq family photos, scan the images, and create digital copies to their owners. Staff members will invite families to deposit digital copies with the museum, but sharing is not a requirement for participation. This one-year effort is funded by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs with assistance from the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak.
In addition to scanning recent photographs, the museum will take pictures of people, places, and activities in collaboration with village residents. The goal of this effort is to create a visual record of modern Kodiak life. These photos will be shared with tribal councils.
For more information and examples of the types of materials that will be saved, read the 2/25/2020 Press Release – Museum Leads Effort to Preserve Alutiiq Family Photos.
If your libraries, archives or museum is doing an interesting project, send us a write up!
The US Government Publishing Office is hosting several webinars in March/April we think might be of interest to the wider library and archives community:
Attendees will receive a Certificate of Participation from GPO for each webinar they attend. Closed captioning is available for all webinars. Registrants will be sent access information upon registering.
View the FDLP Academy Training Repository for recorded webinars and webcasts. All are encouraged to share and re-post information about these free training opportunities.
We recently received the following message from our friends at the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration:
Free educational resources from the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration may be viewed online, downloaded, or shipped for free to middle and high schools, colleges and universities, libraries, and museums.
The USA Vietnam War Commemoration is a Department of Defense office authorized by Congress in 2008 and launched by the President in May 2012 to honor the service and sacrifice of America's Vietnam War veterans and their families. The organization’s History and Legacy Branch’s professional historians and educators have developed materials to aid educators and students in contextualizing the importance of the Vietnam War and the Vietnam veteran in U.S. history.
These materials include:
The teachers’ toolkit is a booklet sized lesson-planning aid filled with Vietnam War websites, primary and secondary sources, links to education plans, films, books and more. It may be downloaded at https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/history_and_legacy/educator_resources/
The organization also collects veterans’ oral histories. These may be viewed at bit.ly/vwcoralhistories. These oral histories provide unique insights into wartime experiences from broad perspectives. Additionally, the VWC creates themed compilation videos to commemorate the shared contributions of veterans.
Visually engaging and easily digestible full-sized posters (each panel is 24 x 36 inches) are also available. With a host of topics that include POWs, the Home Front, Gender and War, Race and War, Medicine, Sensors, Allies, Counterinsurgency, and Helicopter warfare, these works will aid teachers in introducing students to the Vietnam War. New posters are added every few months. To view the current poster listings, please visit https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/history_and_legacy/educator_resources/
Physical copies of posters and the teachers’ toolkits may also be requested by emailing whs.pentagon.wso.mbx.vnwar50th-edu@mail.mil. When requesting materials, please include your name, address, the number of teachers’ toolkits required, and the names and numbers of poster sets requested; the Vietnam War Commemoration will ship these materials for free. Please note that the Vietnam War Commemoration cannot ship to PO Boxes.
From our friends at the Smithsonian Institution:
Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
To search, visit https://www.si.edu/openaccess.
A search on Alaska brought up nearly 63,000 images and 232 videos, such as President Harding Tours Alaska in a Specially Adapted Car.
If you indicate you want just open access materials on Alaska, the number of images drop to 36,000 and no videos.
This resource might be helpful in student reports and art projects unrelated to Alaska, judging from results from these searches:
If you notice items from the Smithsonian getting included in projects, we would love to hear about it!
A recent-ish message from our friends at Zooniverse provides a way to have a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) perspective on Women’s History Month:
We are happy to announce a new Zooniverse project: Star Notes
The Harvard Computers were a group of women who worked at the Harvard Observatory from the late 1800s to early 1900s. This group included Annie Jump Cannon, Williamina Fleming, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and many others. Our goal is to ensure that these notebooks, created by a remarkable group of people, are as accessible and useful as possible.
The goal of Star Notes is to link these notebooks back to their original source material: 500,000 glass plate photographs representing the first ever picture of the visible universe. Each glass plate is identified with a unique plate number. We need you to find and transcribe these handwritten plate numbers in the pages of the notebooks!
This project is part of Project PHaEDRA at the John G. Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The goal of Project PHaEDRA is to catalog, digitize, and transcribe over 2500 logbooks and notebooks created by the Harvard Computers and other early astronomers.
Get involved today: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/projectphaedra/star-notes
And be sure to check out 100+ other active Zooniverse projects over at: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects.
Below are annual events and observances that happen in April that we believe are of likely interest to Alaskans in general or to staff in libraries, archives and museums:
Month long observances
Week long observances
Specific day observances
Conferences
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