Archives & Special Collections, UAA/APU Consortium Library

When you think of archives, do you think of old paper documents?

Sometimes it's that, but sometimes the materials come in as an electronic stream of zeros and ones and on quite a variety of media. Monday we'll all be out of office learning about our new microFRED (Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device) which should help us be able to ingest and deal with the ever-growing amount of digital materials we receive.

If you need to reach us, we might not respond on Monday, but you can send us a message via the Contact Us link on our website: https://archives.consortiumlibrary.org and we'll get back to you just as soon as we can.

Are you curious about what it takes for us to make collections available for research?

When most of your materials are unique, they take some work to make them accessible. And that uniqueness also means that it's hard to come up with baseline labor hours for collections. But here's the data on one project to give you a sense of the work that goes into making a small collection accessible.

The costs of archives: archival processing and description - Archives and Special Collections We’ve been known to say “Archives are expensive!” And they definitely can be. But what does that actually mean? We have the more obvious costs like staffing to make materials accessible, having an environmentally controlled space to house the materials or a digital preservation system (super s...

Of the various projects this week: it's time to flatten this 1944 report with photos glued to the pages: the photos have rolled up and this isn't very good for viewing it or storing it.

How do we do that without cracking/damaging the emulsion on the photographs? We build a humidification chamber. Does that sound complicated? It doesn't have to be. A container with a little bit of water, a baking rack that sits well above the surface of the water, and a plastic bag to fit over the top of the whole thing. These pages with two photos are taking about 45 minutes to relax and pages with one page only take about 15 minutes. Then we place it on a flat surface with non-reactive weights on it until the humidity in the document stabilizes to the room's ambient RH and the item stays flat.

That's really summarized, but it's amazing what some inexpensive supplies can do and how quickly this process can happen with not a ton of labor time. If you'd like to look at the National Park Service's great instructions on how to do this with a lot more information than we've given you, you can find that resource here: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/conserve-o-gram-13-2-flatten-folded-rolled-paper.htm

We have some thanks to give! Due to the amazing and time-consuming work put in by a couple of Archives volunteers, we now have full text transcriptions to all the Ruben Gaines audio recordings we've digitized and placed on the Alaska's Digital Archives.

Thanks to Alice Cone and Robin Hanson who between them transcribed 222 (!) individual recordings, those transcripts are in the description of the items on the Digital Archives. If you'd like to listen or read some them, either because you're a Ruben Gaines fan or just want to admire the sheer hard work that went into this project, all of them are online at: https://vilda.alaska.edu/digital/search/searchterm/sound!uaa-hmc-0110/field/type!all/mode/exact!all/conn/and!all

Whether your siblings are the ones you were born with or the ones you have chosen, we wish you the best on

Two members of the 11th Weather Squadron, identified as Jim Blackwell (left) and "F.X." Kenny (right) pose with, a cat identified as "Kodiak" and a puppy, identified as "Stratus." Kodiak and Stratus were the squadron's pets on Annette Island. For more information about the photo: https://vilda.alaska.edu/digital/collection/cdmg13/id/27627/rec/36