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We recently updated the Libraries and COVID-19 guide with the results of the Pandemic Services Survey that we asked libraries to do. You can find the fruits of the 48 responses we received at:
If you work at a library who doesn't appear on our services page, consider asking your director to have someone respond to our survey.
The Libraries and COVID-19 guide is a team effort of the Alaska State Library Library Development section. You can send comments, questions or concerns about the guide to Daniel Cornwall, Internet and Technology Consultant at daniel.cornwall@alaska.gov.
In September 2020, 29 libraries in Alaska reported wireless internet sessions through the statewide WhoFi contract. These 29 libraries saw 32,624 sessions, which was a 6.6 percent drop from August’s 34,952 sessions.
Sitka remains the leader in wireless sessions, reporting 15,535 sessions in September 2020. Delta Community Library showed the largest August to September increase in wireless sessions at 29%.
Want your library to automatically and accurately collect your wifi statistics? Have your library’s director send a request to Daniel Cornwall, Internet and Technology Consultant at daniel.cornwall@alaska.gov. Learn more about the State’s WhoFi contract and the detail of reports it can provide you with by visiting https://lam.alaska.gov/wireless/whofi.
We're pleased to report that the Alaska State Museum's own Anjuli Grantham was recognized as a Museum Champion at the Museums Alaska Annual Meeting on 9/25/2020. According to their 10/8/2020 press release:
The newest award established this year honors those that roll up their sleeves to help museums succeed, through their service or philanthropy. Two awards were given for Museum Champion. Anjuli Grantham, Curator of Statewide Services at the Alaska State Museum, was honored for her service to all museums in Alaska. When presenting her award, Amy Steffian said, “Anjuli is our go to person for help with all things related to museums. Whatever your question she will help you find an answer or someone to talk to. She is a marvelous connector.”
Two other people and two organizations were honored--Kas Spahr (Volunteer of the Year), Patricia Relay (Presidents’ Award), Juneau Douglas City Museum (Award for Excellence in the Museum Field) and Koniag, Inc. (Museum Champion).
For full details on all the awards, visit Museums Alaska's 10/8/2020 press release, Annual Awards Honor Museum, Professionals, and Koniag, Inc.
We're on Gustavus Public Library's mailing list and we wanted to share their their October/Halloween plans that they sent out the first week in October:
We have a new Grab & Go Activity Kit available outside the library today. The theme is Secret Codes, and we welcome all ages to take a crack at it.
We are also very excited to announce these upcoming Halloween activities!
If it's within your means, please consider donating a bag of candy, or cash/check for our candy fund. We are asking all donations arrive no later than Monday 10/26 so we have time to quarantine them before Halloween. Thank you!
The email came with a flyer that provided additonal detail on the Haiku contest and the Drive-Thru Trick-or-Treat:
The next Friday Bulletin is 11/6. If you did anything special for Halloween [safely] in-person, virtual or over the radio, we'd love a paragraph or two about how it went for the next few Friday Bulletins.
Back on 9/18/2020, the Cordova Times had a guest commentary titled Cultural Connections: Shield and war club class preserves Native culture that reported on a class taught at the Ilanka Cultural Center by master carver Andrew Abyo of Anchorage and partially funded trhough the CIRI Foundation's A Journey to What Matters project.
According to the article, "Eight students, ranging in age from 16 to 74, made a traditional Sugpiaq-styled folding shield and war club throughout this two-week class at the beginning of August."
For more information, including the importance of shields and clubs to Sugpiaq culture, read:
Cultural Connections: Shield and war club class preserves Native culture. Guest commentary by Teal Hansen. Cordova Times, 9/18/2020.
According to the Anchorage Museum's Museum Journal, the CIRI Foundation supported four virtual artists in residence at the Museum. We found this tidbit in a profile of Kunaq Tahbone, an Iñupiat artist. From the profile:
From a young age, Kunaq felt responsible for learning traditional skills, sensing that future generations would want to know these skills, too. She wanted to be able to pass down the knowledge she herself was hungry to gain. As a child, she quietly observed makers in her community, many of whom are well-known artists, but her main teachers were her mother and grandmother. She learned how to tan hides, how to sew and how to bead. Some things, like crimping the hard soles for kammak (pair of boots or mukluk) were skills she learned from seamstresses further north. Her mother supported her and encouraged her to find her own way, to experiment and make mistakes.
For more about Kunaq Tahbone and her current project, we encourage you to read the whole profile at Kunaq Tahbone: On Rootedness and Revitalization. By Francesca Du Brock, Chief Curator. Anchorage Museum Journal, 10/9/2020.
From our friends at the Aultiiq Museum in Kodiak:
A $116,389 Tribal Library Enhancement grant awarded to Koniag, Inc. by the Institute of Museum and Library Services will fund the creation of two publications on Alutiiq history. The Quliyanguarpet—Our Story project, led by the Alutiiq Museum, aims to help young people access detailed accurate information on the Alutiiq past. An Alutiiq storybook for third-graders and an Alutiiq history book for high school students will be written by local experts and distributed for free.
“Alutiiq history is not widely understood or taught in classrooms.” said Alutiiq Museum Executive Director April Laktonen Counceller. “This does not mean our past is unknown. Archaeological, cultural, historical, and linguistic studies have built a rich view of our ancestors’ world. Much of this research has been led by tribal scholars and our own museum. It is now time make their finds widely accessible—to add Alutiiq stories and voices to historical narratives, to help children learn our story and combat hurtful stereotypes.”
Hard copies of both books will be given to schools, tribes, libraries, and Native organizations. The books will also be published as eBooks, for free public distribution.
For more, read their entire 10/2/2020 press release.
The Zooniverse group recently launched ATHENA: Spot Species in Fine Art, a crowd sourced project to find plants and animals depicted in a selection of paintings and printed art from the tremendous collection of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. Why bother? From the "About" page of the project:
By classifying these works of art, you help us build the ATHENA portal which documents the history of biodiversity in the Netherlands. ATHENA is a project funded by a core team of researchers with backgrounds in Biology and History, supported by a broad consortium of knowledge-, heritage- and open institutions. The project aims to develop an internationally unique database allowing researchers from multiple scientific disciplines to study human-nature relationships. The resulting database will provide a platform for large-scale, comparative (both in space and time) and multilevel studies of human-nature relationships. In this portal, paintings will be included to show the history of the iconography of animals and fauna in the Netherlands. However, for many paintings, it is unknown which species are depicted. For this, we ask for your help!
We did a little testing of this site and it seems pretty straightforward to flag plants and animals when they showed up in a painting. And most of the paintings/prints were fun to look through.
Does your Alaskan library, archives or museums have a crowdsourced project? We would LOVE to highlight your project in the Friday Bulletin.
From our friends at the US National Archives:
Hundreds of Native American treaties have been scanned and are freely available online, for the first time, through the National Archives Catalog. Also, in partnership with The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), these treaties and extensive additional historical and contextual information are available through Treaties Explorer.
Through the Treaties Explorer, you can view historic maps and the agreements and tribes that relate, as well as the historical and present day tribes involved in the treaties.
Now, many more descendants of the original peoples can examine the names and seals and read the words set down by their ancestors so long ago. But more than that, the treaties are still relevant today as tribal leaders and lawyers continue to use them to assert their rights in court, such as in cases over land and water rights.
Be sure to check the Resources on the Treaties Explorer website, which include classroom ready curriculum and a set of three guides to increase your knowledge of treaties and how to research using the Treaties Explorer.
Looking for primary sources documenting the Hispanic-Latinx experience in the United States, at least from the government's perspective? Our friends at the US National Archives have some ideas in a 10/9/2020 Education Updates blog post titled Hispanic-Latinx Historical Records at the National Archives. A few highlights from the blog entry:
You can find primary sources documenting the Hispanic-Latinx experience and government relations throughout U.S. history on National Archives websites. There are over 250 examples of historical documents, images, posters, artwork, and more available on DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
On our Hispanic / Latino Heritage page at www.archives.gov/research/hispanic, find primary sources broken out by topics such as:
Read about Hispanic heritage and Latin America on our Text Message blog and posts about Texas Mexican American Soldiers in WWI on this blog.
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month and recognize achievements and contributions of Hispanic Americans at www.archives.gov/news/topics/hispanic-heritage-month.
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