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.
It can take a lot of work and time to create an exhibit. A case in point is the Alaska State Museum's collaboration with the the NN Cannery History Project on a project that celebrates the history and people involved in Alaska’s canned salmon industry. Called Mug Up after the cannery term for a coffee break, the exhibit will share the stories of Alaska’s forgotten cannery crews and showcase the artifacts and history of one of the Alaska’s most significant industries through the lens of the Alaska Packers Association
Thankfully the exhibit partners aren't going to make us wait till 2022 to see anything. The Museum has established a Mug Up exhbit page. Here you can see the current exhibit plans, visit the NN Cannery History Project or link to a Project Jukebox oral history project page and listen to the stories of over a dozen workers.
The SLED committee is pleased to announce that the State and the University of Alaska have partnered to get a statewide SLED subscription to HistoryMakers. According to HistoryMakers, "Over 148,163 stories are assembled here from life oral history interviews with 2,691 historically significant African Americans as of October 1, 2020."
HistoryMakers is currently linked from the Highlighted Databases section of the SLED home page, the A-Z list of databases, the Middle School Resources page, the High School Resources page and the College Resource page of SLED.
In September 2020, the OWL Videoconference Network hosted 92 videoconferences with a total of 319 participants. Representative videoconferences included:
If your public or school/public library does not yet have an OWL issued Zoom account to schedule your own videoconferences OR If you are a non-profit, local, state or federal government agency interested in doing outreach/training through library partners, please contact OWL Program Manager Daniel Cornwall at Daniel.cornwall@alaska.gov
As reported in a 10/2/2020 US Census Bureau press release, the Census Bureau is continuing data gathering for Census 2020 through 10/31/2020. This means that census enumerators will continue to work the field, and people can still respond to the 2020 Census online at my2020census.gov, or over the phone at 1-844-330-2020. They might still be visited by Census enumerators. If people have doubts about whether someone is really from the Census or not, have them check out the Census Bureau’s avoiding fraud page.
Save the date! The 2021 Alaska Library Association (AkLA) Virtual Conference will be held March 18-20, 2021 with the theme Your Library has Left the Building. The conference website with more information will be available soon and will be linked from the main AkLA page.
The Dillingham Public Library has been using the State license to the WhoFi wireless measurement software since March 2020. Recently librarian Sonja Marx send us a copy of her library report to city council with the comment "Our community REALLY uses the WiFi here 24/7. Thanks so much for providing that device and service for us." When we reached out to get permission to use her statement, she stated, "It's amazing the documentation it provides. In June and July, the WiFi was being used literally 24/7. There was someone every hour of every day for those months."
If you'd like to provide your funders with this level of wireless session detail, start using WhoFi at no cost to you! Write Daniel Cornwall at daniel.cornwall@alaska.gov to sign up. You can also see the type of reporting avaiable at our WhoFi program page.
Moose Pass recently posted material relating to a town history project conducted by students of the Moose Pass Elementary School. From their page: Discover the Story of Moose Pass: People, Paths, Places and History:
Awarded by a grant from The Kenai Mountains-Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area, the Moose Pass Sportsmen’s Club expanded this community project into a school history assignment where students of Moose Pass Elementary School researched the founders of their hometown.
The project had citizens of Moose Pass rummaging through drawers and attics for historic photos. One story led to another and before long, people were reconnecting with family members, old timers, and historians to learn more. Two years later, residents celebrated the origin of this small town of 217 people with the dedication of the history project at the newly-constructed library.
Resulting in the professional production of five interpretive panels, development of a DVD slide presentation that includes hundreds of digitized photos, the enlargement and framing of several historic photos for display at the library, and the printing of historic photos for use as postcards.
Over 500 photos can be accessed from the Moose Pass Public Library website, along with images of the five physical panels prepared for their project. We appreciate Moose Pass for sharing their local history with the world.
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From our friends at the Anchorage Museum. Apologies for being a bit late in sharing:
North x North is a multi-modal, multi-sited, multi-month, multi-discipline creative festival examining liminal space — the time between the what was and the what’s next. It’s an exploration of transitions and of not knowing. Join us for virtual events, conversations, exhibitions and workshops. Experience public art installations in Anchorage. Submit to our online journal for a global sharing of ideas. Join us for films, artist perspectives, zines and podcasts that offer perspectives of people and place around the themes of shelter, landscape and intersectional self.
For links to all NxN materials, visit the festival web site.
From our friends at Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI):
Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) has received a federal grant to expand its award-winning Baby Raven Reads program to five additional communities in Southeast Alaska.
The grant, awarded by the Administration for Native Americans, will allow SHI to offer the early-literacy program to Alaska Native families with children ages 5 or younger in Kake, Klukwan, Haines, Metlakatla and Ketchikan.
The expansion, which will be done in partnership with the Chilkat Indian Village, the Organized Village of Kake, the Ketchikan Indian Community, and the Metlakatla Indian Community tribal governments, is expected to serve an additional 240 children and their families.
An evaluation of the program from 2018-2019 by the research firm McDowell Group found that a significant percentage of parents reported increases in their child’s communication, language and literacy skills. Seventy-six percent of respondents said their children were paying more attention during reading times, and 73 percent observed an increase in the use of words and gestures to communicate expressively. Sixty percent of respondents said the program increased their child’s ability to recognize letters and symbols.
For further details and program history, visit SHI's 10/1/2020 press release.
The Library of Congress recently released a tool to help researchers and the public find images embedded in the Library's collection of digitalized newspapers from 1900 through 1963. From the Newspaper Navigator dataset page
:Welcome to the Newspaper Navigator dataset! This dataset consists of extracted visual content for 16,358,041 historic newspaper pages in Chronicling America. The visual content was identified using an object detection model trained on annotations of World War 1-era Chronicling America pages, including annotations made by volunteers as part of the Beyond Words crowdsourcing project. The resulting visual content recognition model detects the following types of visual content:
The dataset page contains much more detail on how the dataset was set up and offers downloads of selected data. The Newspaper Navigator project was also featured in a 9/16/2020 TheNextWeb article titled US Library of Congress launches AI tool that lets you search 16 million old newspaper pages for historical images:The dataset includes more than 1.5 million newspaper photos.
Hat tip to Damon Stuebner for this item
.From our friends at the Institute of Museum and Library Services:
The Institute of Museum and Library Services today announced funding for a pilot program aimed at helping museums access hands-on digital media and technology training and best practices, bolstering the capacity of small, rural, and remote museums across the nation.
Funded by a FY 2020 IMLS National Leadership Grant for Museums, the project will be led and managed by the Association of Midwest Museums (AMM). The other five U.S. regional associations will work as collaborative partners: Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums (MAAM), Mountain-Plains Museums Association (MPMA), New England Museum Association (NEMA), Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC), and Western Museums Association (WMA).
This is the first time that all six regional museum associations will embark on a single nationwide effort, providing a foundation and framework for future collaborative programs and initiatives.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, museums across the nation have pivoted, and increasing their online programs and services in place of in-person experiences. However, with limited staff and resources, small museums face additional barriers to adapt to a new digital reality.
Widespread challenges range from a lack of existing internal capacity to engage new and existing audiences through digital media to limited access to professional development to develop staff skill sets. Those museums in remote and rural areas are in most critical need of assistance to reach audiences online.
A Museum Advisory Committee will inform the program development and provide presentation of best practices. The group’s leaders represent small museums and other national, state, and local professional organizations spanning all six U.S. regions, including the Chicago Cultural Alliance, Utah Museums Association, Small Museums Association, Association of African American Museums, Indiana Deaf History Museum, and the Museum Studies Graduate Program at University of San Francisco. A technology consultant will also offer expert guidance on the project, along with technology instructors and student fellows.
The training needs of small museums span from collections digitization and website and education resource development to discoverability and virtual engagement strategies. The project will present hands-on, step-by-step training sessions by museum technologists, accompanied by introductory sessions featuring strategies used by peer museum practitioners. All session recordings and supplementary resource toolkits will be organized in a Resource Hub website featuring an online community forum supported by student technology fellows. This 18-month project plans to train 5000 museum staff and volunteers of small museums.
For more information about IMLS grants, please visit imls.gov or subscribe to email updates.
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