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 Alaska State Library, Archives, and Museums is documenting the impact of COVID-19 on life in Alaska. You can help by sharing documents, images, journals, audio recordings, videos, and other digital or tangible items relating to COVID-19 in Alaska. Visit our online form to tell us about your ideas. While we can’t promise to accept any particular item for our collections, we will strive to select those having permanent historical value. We aim to preserve the materials we accept and make them available to researchers. Thank you for helping us document this important part of Alaska’s history.
As reported on other lists, As of May 8, 2020, libraries, archives and museums MAY reopen in accordance with Health Mandate 16, Attachment O – Libraries, Museums, and Archives (PDF) and guidance from their local government. When and how institutions open is under local control.
Other reopening resources:
Last month we identified 17 libraries that had implemented automated wireless session counting off of our statewide contract with WhoFi which had their service in place around the time that libraries were closed by Health Mandate 2.1 on 3/17/2020.
For these 17 libraries, we were able to document the following activities while the libraries were reported closed:
We are happy to provide this evidence that libraries remained an important source of internet in their communities during the bulk of the closure period.
As of April 2020, 23 libraries had deployed WhoFi and had recorded a total of 20,142 wireless sessions, or 671 sessions on average each day across those 23 libraries.
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.
In April 2020, the OWL Videoconference Network hosted 38 videoconferences with a total of 300 participants and was one important channel to delivering library services to hunkered down patrons, as well as keeping library staffs connected. Representative videoconferences included:
If your library would like to schedule an OWL videoconference, please visit https://lam.alaska.gov/owl and complete the Schedule a videoconference through OWL form.
Alaskans across the state can experience the Anchorage Museum wherever they are, thanks to their Anchorage Museum from Home page. This page features the following sections:
From our friends at the Alaska Sea Life Center:
The Alaska SeaLife Center (ASLC) will reopen to the public on Wednesday, May 20, following Phase 2 of the state’s “Reopen Alaska Responsibly Plan.” The Center will operate well below 25% capacity and is implementing new standard operating procedures and enhanced health and safety measures to safeguard guests, staff, and animals.
Along with attendance limits that support physical distancing, other health and safety initiatives include online ticket sales only, one-way visitor flow, and enhanced cleaning methods. Staff and guests over the age of 2 are required to wear face coverings. The interactive fish boat exhibit will remain temporarily closed, and the touch tank will be open to view but not to touch. A complete list of all health and safety measures can be found at www.alaskasealife.org/reopening.
For more information, visit their press release.
Last week KUCB reported on a collaboration by the Aleutian Arts Council, the Museum of the Aleutians and KUCB. It was called the 2020 AAC Virtual Coffeehouse. From the KUCB report of 5/8/2020:
The Aleutian Arts Council, the Museum of the Aleutians and KUCB recently coordinated the first ever AAC Virtual Coffeehouse, which also combined unique aspects from Community Arts Show and the Just Desserts event.
This unique program showcased a variety of performers from near and far, and was sponsored by the Aleutian Arts Council, the Museum of the Aleutians, A Better Way Heating, OptimERA and Billie Jo Gehring and Roger Deffendall.
To view this nearly two-hour show, visit:
The 2020 Virtual Coffeehouse/Community Arts Show/Just Desserts is Live! By Chrissy Roes. KUCB,May 8, 2020.
As we reported above, the OWL Videoconference Network is an important channel connecting libraries to their patrons at home. But it’s not the only one. Libraries around the state have been very creative using social media and even public radio to deliver programming to patrons while buildings have been closed. Some libraries are using a mix of tools. The Cordova Public Library used OWL for their Virtual Poetry Slam and, according to the 5/11/2020 Cordova Times, a private Instagram feed to do story time. From the article:
Beginning April 21, the Pajama Read Along has been broadcast at instagram.com/cordovapubliclibraryreads 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Librarian Anna Hernandez first selected “Charlotte’s Web,” an intermediate-level children’s novel about the unlikely friendship between a barn spider and a pig. This will be followed up with other chapter books. Hernandez hopes that these readings will serve as a source of stability and comfort for Cordova children, she said.
“I wanted to do story time, in a way, just to give some kind of normalcy for all the kids in our community who probably aren’t feeling the same way they usually feel,” Hernandez said.
Storytime is one of several arts activities, including the TEEN Art program, to have moved online using streaming technology. However, Hernandez also sees the program as harkening back to the days when families would gather around their radio in the evenings. One adult listener of the Pajama Read Along told Hernandez that her livestreamed reading reminded them of a vintage read-aloud program they recalled airing on KLAM radio.
Currently in beta, the Library of Congress’ Citizen DJ program aims to encourage people of all ages to mine the Library’s audio collections to produce hip hop music. From the project page:
What is Citizen DJ?
Citizen DJ is a project by Brian Foo currently under development during his time as an Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. It invites the public to make hip hop music using the Library’s public audio and moving image collections. By embedding these materials in hip hop music, listeners can discover items in the Library's vast collections that they likely would never have known existed.
Why Hip Hop?
"Since its beginnings in the 1970s, hip hop has become today’s dominant worldwide music genre and cultural movement. At the center of this movement is the DJ, whose role is to excavate, transform, and collage disparate and obscure sounds from current and past cultures to create wholly new, relevant, and infectious music.
The golden age of hip hop was said to be in the late 80s to early 90s when DJs had unconstrained creative freedom to collage from found sounds. This small window of time produced landmark albums such as Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High & Rising, both considered to be culturally significant and selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. These albums were dense and intricate sonic collages composed of hundreds of found sounds. However, the increasing popularity of hip hop in the following decade gave rise to high profile lawsuits resulting in excessive restrictions on how audio could be sampled. Today, collage-based hip hop as it existed in the golden age is largely a lost (or at best, a prohibitively expensive) artform.
I believe if there was a simple way to discover, access, and use public domain audio and video material for music making, a new generation of hip hop artists and producers can maximize their creativity, invent new sounds, and connect listeners to materials, cultures, and sonic history that might otherwise be hidden from public ears."
For more, visit Citizen DJ at the Library of Congress.
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