Historical manuscripts are original documents including diaries, business records, personal papers, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. These cover both the Russian-American (before 1867) and United States periods of Alaska history, with most materials from the 1880s to the present. Major topics include: politics, religions, aviation, mining, engineering, science, biography, mountaineering, and glaciology.

Find Historical Manuscript Collections:

Alaska & Polar Regions Collections

• 2003 - 2004
• 2000 - 2003
• 1999 - 2000
• 1998 - 1999
• 1997 - 1998

The Alaska & Polar Regions Collections are largely the result of thousands of donations over many years from people who share our commitment to Alaska and the circumpolar world.

If you have photographs or personal papers, films, oral history recordings, publications, or other documents that you might be willing to donate, we are eager to hear about them.

Reaching Out

This year we began a public program series in and for the community. There were six 90-minute programs on weekday evenings at the Public Lands Information Center downtown:

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:

Facilities

A year ago we explained how "deferred maintenance" of the Rasmuson Library building would help to preserve our collections. A reallocation approved by the Regents in June will enable us to rearrange our space as well. Among the changes in the latest draft plan:

The Alaska & Polar Regions Department began making annual reports in 1996, but you have not heard from us for three years. Our excuse is that we have been struggling to keep up with our regular work while Rasmuson Library was renovated top to bottom. A more profound reason is that we lost our ideal reader with the death of Elmer E. Rasmuson on December 1, 2000. We trust that the readers of this report will hold us to the same high standards.

The Building

The renovation is complete! Here are some benefits for collections and researchers:

We have begun calling ourselves the APR "Collections" instead of "Department" in order to claim equality with other major research libraries and distinguish ourselves from other UAF units that focus on Alaska. Nothing else has changed.

MANUSCRIPTS

The Alaskan Shepherd. Fairbanks, AK: Diocese of Northern Alaska. Newsletter. Holdings: 1970 (vol. 8, no. 2)-present. Located in Alaska Periodicals.

Alaska Shepherd Photograph Collection, 1930s. 1 lin. ft. (460 photographs). Images of King Island ( Alaska), residents of the island, and Eskimo life and culture. Photographs attributed to Bernard R. Hubbard, S. J. Reprints of original photographs owned by the Catholic Diocese of Fairbanks.