109 Days until January 21, 2020 - Census 2020 Enumeration of Remote Alaska begins in Toksook Bay
180 Days until April 1, 2020 – 2020 Census Day
Resources:
SPECIAL NOTE: No Friday Bulletin was published on 9/18/2019. We are still scheduled to publish on the first and third Fridays of each month.
Alaska Digital Citizenship Week is just over a week away. Schools, libraries and families are being encouraged to teach K-12 students lessons in the areas of:
The Alaska Department of Education has established a digital citizenship page with lesson plans, family outreach guides and more to help you help Alaska’s children live rich and safe online lives.
We also encourage schools and libraries to use our Social Media Plan to promote Digital Citizenship Week during the week itself. If your school or library chooses to participate, we’d love it if you use #AKDigitalCitizenship and #aklearns when you share on social media.
Here are the observances of interest to LAMs or Alaskans in general that we compiled for November:
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.
Today we take a quick look at the SLED history primary sources guide Petroleum and natural gas related collections.
This guide contains collections of primary source material related to petroleum and natural gas, including the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), held at archives, libraries, and museums in Alaska. This guide is not comprehensive and may not include every collection containing material related to these subjects 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.
The Alaska Digital Newspaper Project continues its work of digitizing out of copyright newspapers and highlighting interesting finds in their blog. Last week (9/30/2019) project staff posted Tales of Search and Rescue From Ketchikan, which focused on articles found in the first two reels of the 1962 issues of the Ketchikan Daily News. If you’ve heard that the public domain starts in 1923, you might be wondering how we can post stuff from the 1960s. The project staff provide the following explanation, along with a chart you can see in the blog post:
It is important to keep in mind that while newspapers published by 1923 are part of the public domain, as a general rule, those titles published between 1924 and 1963, and from 1964 to 1977, fall under a special category that merits further research to determine the copyright status.
According to the Library of Congress, more recent registrations or renewals of a pre-1924 copyright term create a special protection for a newspaper. When in doubt, consult the U.S. Copyright Office website records; however, be aware that the information posted on this blog is not comprehensive, nor does it constitute official legal advice—for professional counsel, confer with an attorney at law.
We hope that you’ll visit the AKDNP blog for more, visit Chronicling America where you can access more of Alaska’s newspapers and of course the State Library in Juneau where you can access many more Alaska newspapers on microfilm.
Please help get the word out to artists and other arts organizations that the Alaska State Museum has two open two calls-for-entry:
Both of these calls CLOSE on October 12, 2019. See the State Museum’s Artist Opportunities page for more details and application links.
The Alaska State Archives is pleased to announce a special section for teachers and students of history featuring primary sources, citation guidance, curriculum resources and more.
Student resources include:
Visit the archives education pages at https://archives.alaska.gov/education/ .
We’re happy to share this short notice from Dawn Biddison of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center:
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There is a new, outstanding, free educational resource available online for download:
http://www.seriousanimation.com/nunalleq/
From the creators:
Nunalleq: Stories from the Village of Our Ancestors is a free interactive educational resource for Mac and PC which invites children to explore the story of the archaeological excavations of the Nunalleq sod house. This multi-vocal resource was co-designed by the Nunalleq Archaeology Project and local Quinhagak community. It brings together narratives from archaeologists, Elders, Alaska Native artists and young people within the village.
Watch this short video to learn about the project:
Watch this video for a walk-through of the educational resource:
According to the project website, “The resource will be distributed to schools in the Lower Kuskokwim School District region of southwestern Alaska on USB drives in time for the new term in fall 2019.” Anyone may download the resource. The developers recommend a fast, wired broadband connection for downloading as the Education Resource installers are large (over 1GB). How long might this take? A good formula for calculating download times is:
File Size In Megabytes / (Download Speed In Megabits / 8) = Time In Seconds (Source: Broadband Solutions Australia)
1GB is 1024 MB, so here are few download times at different speeds using the above formula:
Bandwidth matters.
We’re sharing some good news from the people at First Book:
We are now thrilled to share the awardee organizations for First Book’s Offering More Great Books Award (OMG Books Award) in your state.
This initiative unlocked more than $4.7 million in funding to distribute 1.5 million brand new books to children living in low-income communities by the end of 2019. This includes $12,500 in books and eBooks to organizations in Alaska. Here are the awardees:
Rural Alaska Literacy Project (RAL), Chugach School District - The RAL project would supplement multiple current partnership initiatives, such as half-day preschool; family engagement; Alaska Native cultural resources; and college, career and personal/social skill development education for students within the Alaska Native Education Consortium (ANEC). ANEC is comprised of 24 schools in rural Alaska across four district partners, including Chugach School District.
The RAL project will supplement existing family engagement efforts by strengthening at-home libraries for predominantly low-income, Alaska Native preschool students, initiating community book lending libraries to recycle books in communities with no libraries other than within the schools, and rejuvenate outdated Pre-K – 12 classroom libraries.
Community PLUS Schools, United Way of Anchorage - Community PLUS Schools is a collaborative partnership between United Way of Anchorage, the Anchorage School District, and additional community-based organizations that is focused on supporting students who struggle with attendance issues or other non-academic challenges that impede their ability to learn and fully participate in school. PLUS (Promoting Learning Using Supports) facilitates tailored out-of-school student and family programming for students at 12 different schools across Anchorage with populations experiencing high levels of economic need and other challenges.
We recently got this encouraging bit of news from the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak:
With a $18,589 grant from the Alaska Community Foundation’s Alaska Native Social Justice Fund, the Alutiiq Museum is launching the Alutiiq Arts Advocacy project. This one-year effort will assist Native artists with marketing their work to encourage artistic practice and support economic development. Gallery Coordinator Marlise Lee will oversee the daily work of the project with assistance from the museum’s Cultural Arts Committee, a volunteer group that advises the museum on arts programming. Their work begins this month.
According to Alutiiq Museum Executive Director April Laktonen Counceller, “Many talented Native artists have limited access to information on marketing or the basic materials needed to promote and sell their work—information that can help them earn a meaningful wage. This project will take an individualized approach to developing marketing materials for artists. Some people need professional photographs of their work. Others want business cards or a basic website. Still others would like help developing an application to participate in a workshop, attend a class, or apply for an award.”
To assist, the museum is inviting Native artists to apply to participate in the project. All interested artists will also be invited to participate in training webinars and a new artist gallery on the museum’s website. Ten artists will be selected to receive assistance developing personalized marketing materials. For more information on the project, or to participate, please contact Marlise Lee.
For more information see the Alutiiq Museum’s full press release.
David Cox of the University of Alaska Southeast Egan Library alerted us to this item from the University of Alaska Press:
Alaska author and UAF graduate Linda Schandelmeier has won the 2019 WILLA Literary Award for her book of poems “Coming Out of Nowhere,” published in 2018 by the University of Alaska Press. This nationally recognized award honors the best each year in literature, featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the West. Women Writing the West is a nonprofit association of writers and other professionals writing and promoting the Women’s West. The award is named in honor of novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Willa Cather. The winning authors and their books will be honored at the WWW Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas, in October.
“Coming Out of Nowhere” is part poetic memoir and part historical document, set on a family homestead six miles south of Anchorage, where Schandelmeier grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The sparsity of neighbors and roads, and the isolation imposed by family circumstances, made life solitary and sometimes lonely, but rooted in the natural world. The book tells the story of a resilient family surviving on moose meat, potatoes and whatever else they could gather. The poems in this collection suggest a level of human experience beyond the mundane, one in which trees and mountains are almost members of the family. Schandelmeier does not shy away from unpleasant details in her family history, but she also recognizes the experience as one which was nurturing and unique.
In her 9/23/2019 Art Sleuth column for the Anchorage Press, Jean Bundy alerts readers to an ongoing exhibit at the Anchorage Museum:
Tucked away near the Southwest corner of the Anchorage Museum atrium balcony is a small but important exhibition, ‘Alaskans and Salmon (thru January 19, 2020)’ presenting large color photographs of Alaskans who fish for salmon, their catch, and the various ways these aquatic specimens are preserved. A video explains bulldozing the Moose Creek, Chickaloon waterway that was damaged in the 1920s, coal mining and railroad construction era. Fish once mired can once again swim upstream. Another looping film shows a modern processor vacuum-packing salmon fillets and shipping them in those ubiquitous cartons to Seattle via Alaska Airlines. There’s also a display about how the government and scientific agencies monitor migrations by tagging fish, whose life-cycles include their mysterious salt to freshwater sojourns.
Ms. Bundy provides additional context and history about the exhibit and salmon fishing in general. If you can make it to the exhibit, go. If you can’t or just like reading about salmon and art, read the full article titled Commercial, Sport, and Subsistence Salmon Fishing on display through January at the Anchorage Museum.
We are pleased to pass along the following information from Michael Dodge, a contract historian with the Department of Defense's Vietnam War Commemoration:
The United States of America's 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 Vietnam War Commemoration consists of four branches, to include the History and Legacy Branch. Staffed by professional historians and educators, the History & Legacy Branch has developed a series of educational materials to aid teachers in helping their students understand the importance of the Vietnam War in our nation's history.
We are attempting to get these posters and teacher's toolkits into the hands of educators throughout the state of Alaska and welcome your proactive assistance in working through your state networks to raise awareness on our behalf. Our teacher's toolkit is a booklet size lesson-planning aid filled with Vietnam War websites, primary and secondary sources, links to education plans, films, books, and more and may be downloaded online at: https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/education/teachers_toolkit/. We also conduct our own oral histories, which may be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMRrIkdRxgKsjTTJuow0f5w
Our posters are full-sized, visually engaging, and easily digestible primers for students. With a host of topics to include POWs, the Home Front, Gender and War, Race and War, Medicine, Sensors, Indigenous People, Allies, and Helicopters, these works will aid teachers in introducing interested students to the Vietnam War from a variety of fascinating topics. To view our poster listings, please visit: https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/education/posters/. And be sure to have them check back as we are adding new posters every few months!
Posters and teacher's toolkits may be requested by educational institutions to include libraries, museums, and schools by e-mailing whs.pentagon.wso.mbx.vnwar50th-edu@mail.mil. We ship them via FED EX.
We'd also ask that you help us raise awareness of these resources by sharing the following social media posts of ours on your Facebook and Twitter pages. These posts link directly to our educational resources.
- www.facebook.com/359678967425926/posts/2430346967025772/
- https://twitter.com/vietnamwar50th/status/1148983739562766336
Should you want to learn more about the Vietnam War Commemoration, please follow us at https://twitter.com/vietnamwar50th/ or https://www.facebook.com/VietnamWar50th or visit us at https://www.vietnamwar50th.com/contact_us/ to learn more.
Thank you for your time. Should you have any questions on the commemoration, our products, or our efforts, you may contact me at Michael.j.doidge3.ctr@mail or my colleague Debora Cox at debora.r.cox.civ@mail.mil.
If you use the posters or the teacher toolkits, we’d love to hear about your experience.
If your museum is involved in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) activities, consider applying for one of 350 free Explore Science: Earth & Space 2020 toolkits from the National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net).
Explore Science: Earth & Space 2020 toolkits will include:
More information and application instructions can be found on the Explore Science: Earth & Space toolkit page.
Not a museum? The toolkit page has this digital consolation:
Please note that K-12 schools, afterschool programs, libraries, parks, and astronomy clubs are not eligible to receive physical toolkits. Consider downloading a digital toolkit if your organization does not meet eligibility criteria. Digital toolkits will be available for download after the physical toolkits ship.
With Alaska Digital Citizenship Week coming up soon, we thought this was a good time to highlight a report titled “Don’t Feed the Trolls” from the UK group Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). According to the website, “Don't Feed The Trolls is a practical guide to dealing with online trolls. The report draws on new and leading-edge research to explore the psychology of trolling, why trolls behave the way they do, and the best way to deal with them.”
The researchers examined a number of campaigns against public figures and found that engaging with trolling attacks on social media tended to give the attackers a wider audience than they would have been able to drum up on their own.
Some of the suggestions they offer to public figures MIGHT have application to individuals in the LAM communities:
- Resist the urge to respond. You might think winning or losing relies on whether you “win the argument”. But for a troll, winning or losing is about how many people see their propaganda. They don’t have to convert many of your followers to increase their numbers substantially.
- When a troll targets you for abuse, block them immediately; this will ensure that they cannot tweet at you ever again, and removes mentions of them from your notifications. It is remarkable how few people you actually have to block to stop a troll storm in its tracks. Furthermore, it will stop their small networks from being able to target you again in future.
- If you receive several tweets in a short period of time, temporarily switch off app notifications on your mobile devices; this will protect you from unplanned exposure to troll hate.
- Do not post saying that you are being targeted; this will simply invite further abuse and sympathy, all of which raises troll content up in prominence.
The advice on blocking may not apply to institutions. Consider getting legal advice before blocking anyone from your library, archives or museum social media account. The authors of the report also suggest recording the behavior, reporting it to the social media platform companies and note:
You can contact anti-hate organisations directly or, without referencing the trolls’ propaganda, share anti-hate material as a way of ensuring your followers are exposed to arguments for tolerance.
Because the approach urged by the CCDH feels counterintuitive, we strongly encourage you to read the full 12 page report and draw your own conclusions.
From our friends at the US National Archives:
Join us for "Finding Hispanic-Latinx Primary Sources at the U.S. National Archives," a free webinar for educators on Thursday, October 10th from 7 - 8 p.m. EDT/3 – 4 p.m. Alaska
Register now to save your place.
Primary sources related to Hispanic-Latinx culture at the National Archives are numerous, yet can be challenging to discover.
In our online catalog, on DocsTeach.org, and at our research facilities across the country, you can find official military service records, civil rights initiatives, interactions with Latinx advocacy groups, and more.
Join us for this free webinar to learn:
- how to navigate National Archives online resources
- where to find Hispanic-Latinx primary sources
- the best search terms for discovering these primary sources
Register now. A recording of this webinar will not be available.
Find all of our webinars for educators at www.archives.gov/education/distance-learning/professional-development.html.
In celebration of Constitution Day, the Library of Congress launched a new website – constitution.congress.gov – for the Constitution Annotated, the authoritative source for how the Supreme Court has interpreted the nation’s governing document over the years.
With advanced search tools and a modern user-friendly interface, the new website makes the 3,000 pages of the Constitution Annotated fully searchable and accessible for the first time to online audiences – including Congress, legal scholars, law students and anyone interested in U.S. constitutional law.
For over a century, the Constitution Annotated – known officially as the “Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation” – has served as the official record of the U.S. Constitution. Prepared by attorneys in the American Law Division of the Library’s Congressional Research Service, it explains in layman’s terms the Constitution’s origins, how it was crafted and how every provision in the Constitution has been interpreted throughout history.
With this new, modern online home for the Constitution Annotated, the Library’s Congressional Research Service and Law Library of Congress will be able to apprise Congress and the public of new legal developments more quickly and provide links to related information for the study of the Constitution.
Press Release: New Website Makes the U.S. Constitution Searchable with Supreme Court Interpretations Throughout History (Library of Congress, 9/16/2019)
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