81 Days until January 21, 2020 - Census 2020 Enumeration of Remote Alaska begins in Toksook Bay
152 Days until April 1, 2020 – 2020 Census Day
Resources:
SPECIAL NOTE: No Friday Bulletin was published on 10/18/2019 due to Alaska Day
Here are the observances of interest to LAMs or Alaskans in general that we compiled for December:
Month long observances
Week long observances
Specific day observances
Conferences
If you have an annual event or observance that you think should be on this list, drop us a line.
The Sheldon Jackson Museum October Artifact of the Month is a model sled (SJ-IV-D-7). The original maker of the sled is unknown and we have little information about the artifact, but we know that it was purchased for the permanent collection in 1974 by long-time museum volunteer, Alice Postell, from Ray Scobie who resided at the Forty-Mile Roadhouse in Tetlin near Tok, Alaska, along the historic Taylor Highway.
Read more about this model sled »
Today we take a quick look at the SLED history primary sources guide Railroads in Alaska.
This guide contains collections of primary source material relating to railroads in Alaska, held by archives, libraries, and museums across the state. The guide is divided into pages for different railroads, including the Alaska Railroad, the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, and the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. This guide is not comprehensive and may not include every collection containing primary source material relating to railroads in Alaska. Collections featured in this guide include:
All of the Alaskan Primary Sources guides on SLED are supported in whole or in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Alaska State Library.
Do you think having a technology inventory would be useful to your institution? Would you like to learn a bit more about broadband? Maybe decide whether to replace those Cat 5 cables you have lying around?
Check out the State Library’s Toward Gigabit Toolkit page at https://lam.alaska.gov/tgl. Download the kit and maybe the broadband improvement plan. For a brief overview of what’s in the toolkit, watch the video.
Aside from the toolkit, our page has several quick tools to estimate your internet needs and to measure your broadband connections and wifi networks.
During last month’s Sharing Our Knowledge conference, Canadian news (CBC) noted the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum’s 3D duplication of a Tlingit crest clan hat. According to the article, it was replicated at the suggest of the Central Council Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska.
The 3D scanning and duplication technology has a number of applications. The CBC article quoted our own Andrew Washburn, Registrar of the Alaska State Museum, as interested in scanning a 100 year old canoe to get a better idea of what it might have looked like when first built.
Source: 3D technology recreates ceremonial pieces for Tlingit communities. By Mike Rudyk, CBC News, 10/1/2019.
The 2019 conference program of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATLAM) carried this awards notice we’re thrilled about sharing:
Archives Institutional Excellence: The Huna Heritage Foundation Digital Archives
The Archives Institutional Excellence Award recognizes Indigenous archives that demonstrate a significant commitment to the preservation and use of documentary heritage. The Huna Heritage Foundation (HHF), established in 1990 by Huna Totem Corporation, is recognized for its work in fostering and supporting educational and cultural opportunities. For three-decades the HHF has collected materials that represent the collective memory for the XunaKaawu and Hoonah community. In 2018, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, HHF undertook a two-year project to create a digital archive of Hoonah historic and cultural photographs. The project, entitled “Lifting Faces of Our Ancestors,” honored Hoonah Tlingit Elder's stories by connecting their knowledge, family history, and experience with personal photographs and ones held in the HHF library and archives. Hundreds of photographs were donated as a result of visits to the homes of 30 Elders, where interviews sparked memories that helped provide context to the photographs, some of which were over 100 years old. Since its launch date, the Digital Archive has had over 40,000 visits and more than 160,000 page views. The Huna Heritage Foundation is hereby commended for its work to enhance cultural engagement, improve access to knowledge, and expand the documentary heritage of the Hoonah Tlingit culture.
The Huna Heritage Foundation Digital Archives can be found at http://archives.hunaheritage.org/. Hat tip to Julie Niederhauser for this item.
With much help from William Schneider and Karen Brewster, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Project Jukebox has updated the project:
Here’s a bit more on this project from its Jukebox page:
Since the early 1800s women have been struggling against the odds for the right to vote and equality with men. The passing of the 19th Amendment, women's right to vote, on August 18, 1920 marked a significant milestone in women’s rights and advancements in equality. The highlight of this Jukebox is the slideshow, which is a compilation of audio and images.
The slideshow is a product of The Feminist History Project that was created in 1974 by Sherna Berger Gluck to trace the struggle for women's suffrage through oral history. At the time, she was the director of the Oral History Program and professor in the Women's Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach. In 2009, Sherna Gluck allowed the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Oral History Program to create this Suffragists Project Jukebox program from that material.The photos and audio of the slideshow were digitized and the Jukebox website was created in Testimony Software by the UAF Oral History Program staff. In honor of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in 2020, the Jukebox was updated in 2019 into its current Drupal 7 format.
Hat tip to Leslie McCartney for this item.
A recently article on KTVA highlighted some interesting ways that public art facilitated by the Anchorage Museum is giving people new perspectives. Items include actual burned trees, a ramp marked with tide readings and a phone booth inviting people to hear a prerecorded story of an epic battle between the Aluetiiq people and the Dena’ina of Eklutna.
For more, read the full article:
Public art inspires people to look at landscape in a new way. By Lauren Maxwell. KTVA, 10/5/2019.
We like hearing what other Alaska library people are recommending/noting. Cathy Sherman noted that “many people” appear to be reading these dozen books in a brief 10/6/2019 article for the Cordova Times:
What’s popular in your neck of the woods/tundra/coastline?
Museums are more than rooms with artifacts. They are filled with expertise on the subjects a museum collects in. Their expertise is often acknowledged by their surrounding communities.
Such is the case for the University of Alaska Museum of the North, as highlighted in an October 25 article posted to Alaska Native News. The article begins with a woman bringing the museum a small jar with white worms. The museum brought in Derek Sikes. The article began with his guesses, then follows him through his networks, professional reading and lab tools. Eventually he determined the mystery organisms were tapeworms – which usually aren’t found on the forest floor.
For more, read the full story at:
If someone you know has been upset by Facebook sharing “a memory” at the exact wrong time, point them to the Facebook help page How do I control what I see in Memories? This page will let you filter out memories by either person’s name or by date range. You cannot disable Facebook Memories entirely.
The Folger Shakespeare Library has had a lot of practice in teaching students about Shakespeare. They’ve recently written about how to take their “Folger Method” and applying it to teaching ALL literature. This method is based on eight core principles:
For details, read:
If you’re looking for a gentle introduction to computer programming, consider Google’s Grasshopper coding class, recently released in a desktop version. It has been available for iOS and Android since 2018.
As of this writing the course consists of four modules: Fundamentals I and II that teach you the basics of programming and two “Intro to Web Development” modules. You must complete each module in order. After completing all four modules, user will be able to build a simple webpage and hopefully be able to take on more complex courses on other platforms such as Codeacademy, freeCodeCamp or EdX.
Last month the Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL) made some of the presentation materials from their 2019 Annual Conference available online. A few examples of materials shared include:
We recently had a few reports from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) cross our desk that we felt worth sharing in the current environment of concern over life in the digital age:
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