Alaska & Polar Regions Department : Annual Report : July 1998-June 1999
Preservation
Preservation is our featured topic because we have been helping to plan for the $11 million in deferred maintenance that the State Legislature and the University Regents have mandated for our thirty-year-old building with its fifteen-year-old addition. These will be the gains for preservation:
- We already have good environmental control in our vaults for rare books and films. This project will extend special protection to other collections. Our first priority is stability, with the ambitious goal of limiting fluctuation to +/-2°F and +/-5% relative humidity. Our second priority is lower temperatures: 60° for archival paper, 50° for magnetic tape, and below the current 50° for film. The greatest challenge will be to humidify the 12,000 shelf feet of archives, manuscripts, and photographs through the winter without producing condensation on the building's outer walls.
- Ultraviolet light damages paper. We have reduced it in the current system by disabling ceiling fixtures and introducing filters and special bulbs. The new scheme will produce better results at lower operating cost with motion sensors in storage areas and task lighting in patron and staff work areas.
- Every instance of water leakage in the past fifteen years will be "remediated" at its source. The shortcut that led to flooding under the open stacks in 1997 has already been reversed.
Peggy Asbury, Gretchen Lake, Robyn Russell, Dirk Tordoff, and Richard Veazey have provided curatorial expertise and institutional memory to the engineers, architects, and planners.
Our next biggest preservation news is from the Alaska Film Archives:
- The Film Archives is one of twelve beneficiaries nationwide in the first round of awards from the National Film Preservation Foundation (re-granting funds from the National Endowment for the Arts). The program's official name is "Treasures of American Film Archives," but we use its working title of "orphan films." Our role is to enable a California laboratory to prepare new negatives and prints for three rare films:
The Chechahcos, produced by Austin "Cap" Lathrop in 1924.
People of the Tundra, Major Marvin "Muktuk" Marston's film about the Alaska Territorial Guard.
A Trip to the Cleary Hill Mine, prepared for its stockholders in 1935.The award was publicized on Anchorage and Fairbanks television and in a feature article in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Dirk Tordoff prepared the proposal.
- The National Bank of Alaska has begun making annual gifts for film preservation. This support is doubly valuable because it provides matching funds for grants from other sources, including the orphan film project.
And here are some of our ongoing preservation activities:
- Marvin Washington continued microfilming the President's Office records from the William R. Wood administration. This is in addition to his regular work on current Alaska newspapers and newly acquired rare books.
- Richard Veazey, Cal White, and several student assistants in the Photo Lab made 4x5 master and copy negatives of 3,800 images in a dozen historical photograph collections, some belonging to us and some loaned for copying.
- Peggy Asbury and student assistant Heidi Kristenson resumed the volume-by-volume condition assessment of the rare book collection that began in 1995. When they finish the survey this fall, it will set priorities for production of protective boxes.
Acquisitions
These are some of the highlights of the year's 610 book purchases:
Rare
- Wilhelm Heine. Die Expedition in die Seen China, Japan und Ochotsk unter Commando von Commodore Calw. Ringgold und Commodore John Rogers, im Auftrage der Regierung der Vereinigten Staaten unternommen in den Jahren 1853 bis 1856-- Leipzig: Purfurst, [1858].
This account of the North Pacific Exploring Expedition covers the Kamchatka coast, the Bering Strait, Petro-Pavlovsk, the Sea of Okhotsk, and Yakutiia. The Yakut and Chukchi people are described in terms of their environment and their skills such as hunting and kayak-building. - Rev. John Malham. The Naval Gazetteer: or, Seaman's Complete Guide, containing a full and accurate account, alphabetically arranged, of several Coasts of all the Countries and Islands in the Known World: shewing their Latitude, Longitude, Soundings, and Stations for Anchorage-- Boston: 1796.
This very scarce American edition of an 18th-century English nautical guide contains what is believed to be the first mapping of Alaska published in the United States. It offers such northern locations as "Old Greenland," the town and sea of "Okotsk," Baffin Bay, and many Alaskan places such as "Oonalaska," "Bristol Bay and River," Prince William Sound, and the Aleutians.
Semi-Rare
- Peter Kragh. Udtog af missionair P. Kraghs dagbog. Haderslev: Th. Sabo, 1875. Selections from the diary of a Lutheran missionary in Greenland.
- Arctic whaling disaster 1871. Owners and crews of certain American whaling vessels-- Washington, 1890.
- The story of Hans Egede and the Moravians: with an account of their devoted labours in the Gospel in the far North. Kilmarnock, Scotland: John Ritchie, [19-?].
- Valdemar Lindholm. Lapska folksagor och aventyr: berattade for barn av Vandemar Lindholm. Stockholm: A.V. Carlsons Bokforlags-Aktiebolag, 1913.
Variously cataloged as "Fairy tales--Sami," "Mythology, Finno-Ugrian," and "Folk literature--Lapin laani (Finland)."
Current
- The Paleo-eskimo cultures of Greenland: new perspectives in Greenlandic archaeology. Edited by Bjarne Gronnow and John Pind. Copenhagen: Danish Polar Center, 1996.
- A. R. (Al) Williams. Bush and Arctic pilot. Surrey, B.C.: Hancock House, 1998.
- William Mills and Peter Speak. Keyguide to information sources on the polar and cold regions. London; Washington: Mansell, 1998.
- N.M. Davidenko. Problemy ekologii neftegazonosnykh I gornodobyvaiushchikh regionov Severa Rossii. Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sibirskoe predpriiatie RAN, 1998.
The topic is the environmental impact of petroleum engineering in frozen ground.
And here are some of the year's gifts and purchases of unpublished primary sources:
Oral History
- Two interviews with Father Jim Kolb, former Catholic chaplain at UAF, by Robyn Russell.
- Eight interviews with long-time Pearl Creek residents by Deborah Wilkinson's 4th-6th grade class at Pearl Creek School. Participants include environmentalist Celia Hunter, farmers Gordon and Marilyn Herreid, and ornithologist Brina Kessel. Robyn Russell launched the project with a how-to presentation.
- Two interviews with Eli Charlie of Nenana, Athabaskan elder and former trapper, aged 92, by Karen Brewster and Robyn Russell.
- Interviews with scientists Carl Benson and Arthur E. "Ned" Manning by Karen Brewster, beginning a series on the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow.
Manuscripts
- twenty handwritten notebooks of C.A.F. Swete documenting his mining and trading activities in Kotzebue in the 1890s
- twenty-four letters from Frieda Dilley to her sisters Emma and Dosie as she moved around the Klondike region in 1899.
- Mrs. N. Shepard's diary of her trip from Seattle through Dawson to Nome, 1906-1907.
- A child's notebook with writing exercises in Yup'ik, Latin, and English, possibly from Hooper Bay in 1938.
Photographs
- Album containing 137 photographs of the Seward Peninsula, 1907-1908.
- 126 Fairbanks photographs from the Kinney family, 1919-1939, given by Gladys Kinney Pagenkopf.
- 190 photographs of the Aleutians and the Pribilof Islands from Greta Ericson, 1913-1930s.
- 13 albums of Fairbanks photographs, 1940s-1980s, by Gordon and Doris Wear.
- 100 prints of Fairbanks and Ladd Field in the 1950s, from the Paul Vane Livingston Papers.
Films (all 16mm color)
- KTVF-TV--400 reels covering Alaska news in the 1960s and 1970s.
- KUAC-TV--30 reels on Alaska topics in the 1970s.
- Wallace Raabe--4 reels on Wildwood Station and towns on the Kenai Peninsula, 1951-1955.
- Henry Johnson--10 reels showing DEW Line construction, a military aircraft salvage operation, and the building of the Mendenhaven subdivision in Juneau, 1960s.
- Tom and Arlene Hadley--2 reels showing Alaska vacation travel in the 1950s. Given by their granddaughter, Chandini M. Backman.
Once again we are greatly indebted:
- to Elmer E. Rasmuson for purchase of books, manuscripts, and photographs.
- to Candy Waugaman for gifts from her personal collection and alerts about dealer offerings.
- to Troy Pewe for a continuing stream of science publications.
- to the many Alaskans and Outsiders who trust us with their documents and memories.
Digital Projects
Digitization is not yet a widely accepted method of preservation--but it is an increasingly important method of access, and our Jukebox and Wenger projects on CD-ROM made us pioneers in this field.
Project Jukebox completed four more multi-media oral history databases this year, bringing the total to twenty-one, and advanced or initiated several others:
- Research associate Karen Brewster coordinated the Lake Clark project with contributions from Karen Stickman of Nondalton and John Branson of Port Alsworth. She also took the Katmai project to the final stage of local review; advanced the Sitka Jukebox with assistance from Kristen Griffin, for the National Park Service, and Robi Craig, for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. The Park Service sponsored all these projects.
- Research associate Dave Krupa coordinated the Wrangell-St. Elias Jukebox, another Park Service project, with assistance from Ruth Ann Warden, a Copper Center resident and Park Service interpreter. He also prepared the Chenega Village Jukebox from interviews conducted by Rita Miraglia with support from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
- Professor Emeritus James Kari completed a Native place names documentation project for Denali, with support from the National Park Service.
Two UAF senior anthropology majors, Bill Burke and Jarrod Decker, played prominent parts in the Katmai, Lake Clark, Wrangell, and Chenega projects.
The vision behind Project Jukebox is to use digital technology to make historical and cultural materials easily accessible in the communities they represent. The typical form of access has been a CD-ROM server in a park visitor center or a rural gathering place such as a school or library. Because of the size and complexity of the databases, access at UAF has been by individual arrangement. To improve access for UAF students, the Technology Advisory Board made a grant this spring to provide "One Stop & One Step Access" to all of the projects on one computer in the APR Research Room. It is not easy to reconcile ten-year-old Hypercard software with the latest Apple operating system, but we expect to be fully operational this winter.
The next challenge is to begin making the Jukebox projects available over the Internet. This is an exciting possibility, but we need to proceed with great care. This is because the Alaskans who contributed to the projects must first have the opportunity to decide whether they want their individual expressions of history and tradition to be so easily available and reproducible. This possibility did not exist when most of the interviews were given.
Jim Ketz, Jeff Pederson, and Rose Speranza made good progress toward a version of the Wenger Anthropological Eskimo Database that will be searchable with non-proprietary Web software. Because suitably sophisticated products have come on the market more slowly than predicted, they are pioneers in the use of Internet Explorer 5 and development of an associated style sheet. We are grateful that Mrs. Beatrice Wenger continues to extend financial and moral support. John Lehman of the School of Management remains on call as volunteer technical advisor, and David Seaman of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia has been very helpful.
In addition to our funded projects, we continue to increase the use of digital technology in our photo lab. We also continue to seek funding for new digital delivery projects. Despite our early lead, we are finding it difficult to compete with libraries that have digital specialists as permanent staff when many funders insist on continuing technical innovation, regardless of our incomparable content and community participation.
Cataloging and Indexing
About 7,000 volumes of Alaskana have moved from storage to open shelves over the past four years with no effort on our part. The secret is that Debbie Kalvee and the team-spirited staff of the Department of Bibliographic Access Management have developed outsourcing as a cost-effective means of reducing a backlog that had built up over many years. Because the new catalog records are widely available through the OCLC international bibliographic utility and our Internet-accessible University of Alaska online catalog, they are a major contribution to the circumpolar bibliographic record as well as a great service to our local patrons.
Our largest indexing effort is the Alaska/Polar Periodical Index. Ron Inouye, Robyn Russell, and Liam Wescott produced 6,167 entries this year. Many of the publications are indexed nowhere else, and copies of the articles are available at no charge within Alaska through interlibrary loan.
Robyn spends her mornings indexing periodicals and her afternoons improving access to our oral history holdings. By making entries in the oral history online index, she enables researchers who are knowledgeable about oral history to select relevant passages with precision. By making entries in the online catalog, she enables people who might never have imagined using oral history recordings to discover them routinely as they search for books on Alaska topics. Requests for circulating copies, mainly from UAF students, increased from 573 in 1997-98 to 654 this year.
Interlibrary Cooperation grants from the Alaska State Library increase our ability to spread the word about our holdings:
- This year's grant for the Alaska/Polar Periodical Index added the first century of Alaska and polar articles in National Geographic to the current coverage maintained since 1988. An award for the coming year will cover one-third of Farthest North Collegian, published monthly by the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines (now UAF) from 1923 to 1950.
- An Interlibrary Cooperation grant for 1998-1999 enabled Peggy Asbury and student assistant Richard Miller to upgrade existing records for 400 manuscript and photograph collections so that they could be added to the UA online catalog. A new award will enable Dirk Tordoff to create 200 new records for archival films.
The State Library is happy to support these activities because the UA online catalog and the Alaska/Polar Periodical Index are typically the first and third most popular sites on SLED, Alaska's Internet-accessible Statewide Library Electronic Doorway. They are also featured on international clearinghouse sites such as Polar Web.
Readers who are familiar with the periodical index and online catalog may object that they are not easy to use, especially from off-campus sites. The answer is that Rasmuson Library's fifteen-year-old online information system will be replaced this winter with the latest Web-based software. Most other large libraries in Alaska will be using the same system, so mastery of one will be mastery of all.
Publications and Exhibits
Every year we provide material for other institutions' exhibits. This year we produced one on our own: "The Butler Brothers' Gold Rush: The Nome Album, 1900-1901." This is a six-panel traveling exhibit that presents and interprets an ornamented photograph album documenting the Alaska adventure of the Butler Brothers of St. Paul, Minnesota. The exhibit opened in Nome just in time for their centennial celebration, then visited Dawson for Discovery Days. Now it is at the Loussac Memorial Library in Anchorage, and it will appear at the annual meeting of the Alaska Historical Society and Museums Alaska before returning to Fairbanks via Juneau. Ron Inouye devised the value-added schedule, and we expect that curators who see the exhibit in Anchorage will want to book it for their own institutions next year.
The Butler Brothers project was funded jointly by the Alaska Gold Rush Centennial Task Force (using funds from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management) and UAF (with assistance from an anonymous benefactor of our photograph collections). UAF's principal contributions are black-and-white photography for preservation (in addition to the color prints for display) and digital reproduction for a Web version to be up by January 2000.
We also played a prominent role in two publications sponsored by other organizations:
- Alaska Newspapers on Microfilm, 1866-1998 is the culmination of the Alaska Newspaper Project, a multi-year collaboration between the Alaska State Library (in the lead role) and UAF, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The book was produced at UAF with editorial assistance from Kay Shelton and Mary Nicolson in Juneau, and distributed free to libraries across the state.
- First Catch Your Moose is the Tanana-Yukon Historical Society's facsimile reproduction of our copy of the first edition of a delightful cookbook prepared by "the ladies of the Presbyterian church" in Fairbanks 90 years ago. Among the additions are six photographs from our collections and a dozen recipes handwritten by the cook who owned our copy. It is available for $10 at the UAF bookstore and many other locations. The Alaska Gold Rush Centennial Task Force assisted the society with printing costs.
The "we" in these accomplishments has two key members: Richard Veazey of our own photo lab and Dixon Jones of Rasmuson Library's Academic Media Services Department. Richard and his staff made the photographic and digital reproductions for the exhibit and the cookbook. Dixon produced handsome designs for all three projects, mounted the exhibit, and assembled the digital files from which both books were printed.
Film from the Alaska Film Archives was the center of attraction on several Alaska occasions:
- Footage taken by Edith Ross Oliver, first schoolroom teacher in the new settlement of Anaktuvuk Pass, were shown there to an enthusiastic local audience as part of the 50th anniversary celebration.
- The Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association presented film clips on Alaska politics for a benefit in Anchorage and a legislators' event in Juneau. Most of the pre-1970 footage came from the Alaska Film Archives.
- Anchorage filmmaker Laura Bliss Spaan premiered her restoration of the Fred and Sara Machetanz lecture film, Alaska: The 49th State, at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. Both the silent film and the audio tape of the accompanying lecture came from the Alaska Film Archives.
Visits and Presentations
More than a thousand individuals of all ages came for group visits this year. Gretchen Lake made eighteen presentations for Elderhostel and two for local senior citizens' groups. Various Oral History and Archives staff members made presentations to eleven UAF classes and four elementary and middle school classes.
Karen Brewster offered an all-day workshop on community oral history to twenty-seven people from the Aleutian/Pribilof Islands Association. This was at the annual meeting of the Alaska Federation of Natives.
Cal White offered two series of lunchtime interviews with African-American women and men who came to Fairbanks in the 1940s and 1950s and became leaders in politics, religion, and business in "The Great Land." The contributors were Wilma Rutherford, Arlene McCormick, Emma Green, Rubye Thomas-Reynolds, Mary McHenry, Lucille Keno, Emma Avery, Phillip Jackson, Elder Ivory Thornton, Elder James White, Woodrow Robinson, Mayor James Hayes, Elder Otis McCormick and George Byrdsong. These presentations were a rich experience for the UAF and community audience, and Cal's videotapes will contribute to his multi-media thesis project in the Northern Studies program.
A special visitor this year was Lt. General Thomas Case, commander of Alaskan Command in the joint U.S. Pacific Command. Chancellor Wadlow put us on his campus tour for a demonstration of Project Jukebox and a display of World War II materials from the Archives.
Tamara Lincoln continued to extend professional and personal assistance to visiting scholars from Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union. Visitors and their topics included:
- Dr. Marina Burkanova, Novosibirsk State University--use of medicinal plants by indigenous peoples.
- Dr. Yurii M. Shelemanov, Ural State Academy of Mining--dumping of nuclear waste and other hazardous materials, and the effect on Arctic ecosystems.
- Dr. Valentina Sergeevna Burgh--commonality of designs in decorative arts and costumes between Alaska Eskimos and other Arctic peoples.
- Dr. Petr A. Koromanov, University of Irkutsk--comparative land sovereignty issues in the Arctic.
Other international visitors included Jean-Loup Rousselot from the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich, Yvon Csonga from the University of Neuchatel, and Harald Tingstaff from the University of Tromso.
Tamara Lincoln was an invited speaker for the Northern Perspectives Conference at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. Her topic was "The Socio-Political-Cultural Status of the Russian Arctic Minority Nations: A Research Perspective." Will Schneider, curator of oral history, returned to South Africa (the site of his 1997 Fulbright fellowship) to present a paper and a workshop. Ron Inouye presented a paper on polar web sites at Polar Libraries Colloquy in Reykjavik with Judy Triplehorn, head of the geophysical sciences library at UAF.
1998-1999 Staff Roster
University-Funded Faculty and Staff
Project Faculty and Staff
Karen Brewster completed her M.A. in oral history and folklore, with a thesis on Harry Brower, Sr., whaling captain of Barrow. Keri Frazier completed her M.A. in community psychology and left for Nenana in October to pursue a career in that field. Dave Krupa returned in November, having just completed his dissertation on Chief Peter John of Minto at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jeff Pederson completed his B.S. in geology.
Student and Seasonal Staff
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