But that isn’t what I wanted to say, which is Thank You to Ermalee Hickel. Thank you on behalf of Archives and Special Collections, the Consortium Library, and all the researchers who may someday find that the information they are seeking is available in the Hickel papers. And I don’t want that thanks to wait any longer.

Here’s why. Governor and Mrs. Hickel gave us a portion of their papers a few years back and more this month (one more shipment is scheduled for tomorrow morning). It’s a relatively sizable collection–I’m estimating about 400 cubic feet or so–and sometimes what happens with collections of that size is that the sheer size of them can often mean that they end up in some sort of a backlog queue: waiting for an archivist to get the block of time needed to describe them. Now we’re not real fans of backlogs around here these days but with collections this size, scheduling the time it will take to do the collection–and the researchers–justice, well, it can be difficult.

And Mrs. Hickel has solved that problem for us. She has provided a rather large funding donation that will enable us to hire the help we need to make these papers accessible to researchers. Which is, after all, the reason she and her late husband gave them to us. It’s not going to be immediate: we want to make sure we spend that funding very wisely, so we need to spend some time now to come up with a good plan for handling it, but it is going to be faster than it would have been without the funding. And over the time of the project, we’ll be able to describe the collection to a level that ensures researchers will be able to find what they are seeking in it.

One more quick note. The big move of materials this month happened on the 18th.  August 18th would have been Governor Hickel’s 91st birthday. I like to think that he would have been pleased that on his birthday, a little bit more of his and Ermalee’s legacy was preserved for future generations of scholars, researchers, and the Alaskan community.

One of the aspects that I really enjoy about working at A&SC are the tours and workshops we provide to students, faculty, and community members.  On Friday, June 18^th, I had the opportunity to give a tour to four incoming freshman and their faculty mentor, Dr. Gabriel Garcia from Public Health. Two of the students were Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program (ANSEP) students: Concepcion A. Melovida and Jasmine George.  The other two were Step Up students for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease (NIDDK): Kelsey E. Powell and Nina Pastor.

Early in the week, Dr. Garcia called wondering if I could provide a tour for his mentees. He had already set up an instruction session with Sally Bremner, one of our health science librarians, and thought they should get a chance to see the archives as well. I have worked with Dr. Garcia on a few projects and was glad to hear that he thought of the archives when he thought about resources he would like to show his students! After promptly saying, “YES!” he gave me an idea of what types of programs the students were interested in and I went from there.

Friday morning I gathered some materials that might be of interest.  Since Concepcion and Janine were interested in engineering I pulled out 4 folders from the Edwin Crittenden collection that contained photographs of experimental houses in Napaskiak, Eek, Aniak, Beaver, and Kotzebue.  Crittenden was an architect and interested in historic preservation and learning more about building in Arctic climes. Dr. Garcia mentioned that Kelsey and Nina have an interest in public health. So I went ahead pulled out some materials from the Alaska Health Project that dealt with the Exxon Valdez oil spill and their investigations into the side effects cleanup workers were or would experience during the cleanup. For fun, I pulled some slides from the William E. McNutt photographic slides that depicted a fire fighting exercise in the fifties; the Alaska Repertory Theater’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream production book and photographs from the production; the Edmund G. Smith World War II diary, and an album from the Michael Philip papers and photographs that had pictures taken while filming Eskimo.  After a brief tour they got a chance to explore the materials and ask questions.  And they asked some great questions, we even had a chance to talk about copyright issues in archives.  One of my favorite questions was, “You mean I can come here and read stuff if I want to?”… YES! Edmund’s diary was a big hit and one of the students expressed interest in returning to read people’s diaries.  But who wouldn’t like reading people’s diaries! For snip-its of the diary, check out my blog entry: Dear Diary.

Also, Dr. Garcia especially enjoyed our ghosts of technology’s past exhibit in the reading room. It even inspired nostalgia for Dr. Garcia who took a picture of iPhone together with the Mac computer (circa late 1980s), just like the one he used to have. Concepcion, Kelsey, Nina, and Jasmine were intrigued by AMIPA’s television in the reading room (1953), that still works, digital cable aside. All in all, I hope they had fun. I know I did. Plus I got to do some of my favorite things: look at some of my favorite collections, give a tour, and encourage people to come to the Archives! So thanks to Dr. Garcia, Concepcion, Kelsey, Nina, and Jasmine for making my Friday a lot of fun!

“What are these blue thingies?” That’s a question I’ve heard countless times from interns and volunteers processing photo collections.  “Are they supposed to look that way?”

Yep, they sure are.  Those “blue thingies” are one of my favorite early photographic processes: cyanotypes.  And they are indeed a brilliant, unmistakable blue, as you can see in this wonderful  cyanotype (right) of an Alaska Native man and woman taken by Edwin F. Glenn in 1898 during his explorations of Cook Inlet with the U. S. Army.  Cyanotypes achieve this distinct color because the paper is brushed with an iron-salt solution (often potassium ferricyanide and ammonium ferric citrate) that turns blue when exposed to light.  They are literally “blueprints” – and a very similar process is still used today to make copies of architectural prints by the same name.  Though the cyanotype process itself was first developed in 1842 by astronomer and scientist Sir John F. W. Herschel, most cyanotypes, like this one, were produced between 1880 and 1920.

What I personally love about cyanotypes is that they always seem to have a kind of innocent quality about them.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographers had their pick of a numerous ways to make photographic prints, from the expensive and artful (such as platinotypes, luminously toned with platinum powder) to the inexpensive and artless (as seen in countless blurry snapshots caught by early Kodak push-button cameras).  Cyanotypes were an intriguing, happy medium.  They offered the budding artist a chance to experiment with photographic chemistry without emptying her wallet on costly supplies.  Because of this, cyanotypes were largely the amateur’s choice of process, and it’s true that many of those found in today’s archival collections bear witness to the fumblings of unskilled photographers, being underdeveloped, blurry, unevenly cut, or worse.

However, there are equal numbers of nineteenth-century cyanotypes that have a crystalline details and fine shading, like this cyanotype (left), also taken by Edwin Glenn on his 1898 expedition, of a man reclining on a bear skin.  Glenn was a classic cyanotype photographer: an amateur whose diary reveals that he took care with the details of lighting and composition but whose ultimate concern was to make an efficient, workable (but not necessarily “artistic”) final print that showed the scientific details of his expeditions to Alaska.  At the same time, there’s something inherently captivating about good cyanotypes like his.  No matter whether Glenn intended them as simple scientific depictions of the Cook Inlet expeditions and the Inlet’s peoples and geography, the blue tones of cyanotypes add a bit of intensity that makes even the mundane look fresh and interesting.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be highlighting other early photographic processes that appear in our collections.  Up next: tintypes!

[Editor's note: Courtesy of grant funding supplied by the Alaska State Library and the Institute for Museum and Library Services in 2008-2009, A&SC was able to digitize and provide metadata for all the photographs we hold in the Glenn papers and to place them online in the Alaska's Digital Archives. Search Edwin Glenn. Not all of the images are cyanotypes and not all of the images were taken by Glenn, but you'll find several. That grant also allowed us to provide a digital edition of the diary too.]

The processing of the Alice E. Brown papers is close to an end.  I will soon reach the destination of a fully processed collection.  But to add a little extra excitement to my journey, I’ve talked with Arlene and I am going to create a record of all the people I met along the way.  So who are these people?  They are the people that wrote to Alice Brown, to whom she wrote, and people who forwarded their letters to her. They are the correspondents. I am excited to create this list since this level of description is atypical in archival practices.  Most archivists do not have the time or the funds to create such a list/index, especially with a looming backlog waiting to be processed.  But with the help of CIRI Foundation’s grant award, we can create more detailed descriptions.

So why am I looking forward to creating this index? First of all, though there is a correspondence series in the collection, there is correspondence scattered throughout the collection.  Most of the correspondence outside of the correspondence series is in Series 1: organization and committee series.  The majority of the correspondence in series 1 is correspondence discussed during meetings or forwarded to the membership of committees in which Alice was involved.  The resulting correspondence index will reflect correspondents from throughout the collection.  So people looking for correspondence written by Emil Notti or William L. Hensley can do so.

Another reason I am excited to create this index surface glance of the people involved in improving the quality of life and ensuring equality for Alaska Natives.  From what I have already noted, there is a significant amount of correspondence related to the passing of ANCSA.  Lists of correspondents include Emil Notti, Eben Hopson, Donald Wright, Nels A. Anderson, Paul Bokyo, Walter Hickel, Mike Gravel and so on.  But then there are the other facets of the AFN organization that focused on education, health, public relations, personnel, and job training.  And some of their names will be reflected in the index due to the correspondence Alice brown kept.

And the final reason that I find creating this detailed list so exciting: I get to spend more time with Alice’s papers!

I have been steadily working through the Alice Brown papers and discovered that we share a common characteristic; we doodle when taking notes. Amidst Alice Brown’s handwritten notes are doodles she did during meetings. These doodles range from simple boxes she drew around notes she wrote to elaborate pictures. Below are examples of doodles from her collection:

These notes were taken during an Alaska Federation of Natives board of directors meeting. Alice attended the meeting as Cecil Barnes’ proxy. The first page is dated November 11th, 1971, while the second page is undated but appears to have been taken at the same meeting. I decide to follow the doodles and notes like signs and get some context for what she may have been listening to or talking about while she doodled the flower, encased certain notes in boxes, and created the Don Quixote picture.

I turn to the November 11 meeting minutes. After looking at the board meeting minutes from that day the notes start to make sense. For example, from 10am to 2 pm (with a lunch recess before 12pm), Ken Bass and the board of directors discussed the House and Senate bills that were passed and the upcoming joint House-Senate committee meeting. That is a lot of time to doodle. The “motion by John” to share timber for a limited period of 30 years was John Borbridge’s amendent to the motion to “accept recommendations to the White House made by counsel for the sake of discussion.” It passed unanimously. John Borbridge then makes a motion to include non-reservation Tsimshians in the land claims bill, this is seconded by Alice Brown. It passed by majority. She did not take note of this motion in her notes.

On the next page of notes is where Alice drew a picture depicting Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the infamous windmill. Alice probably drew the picture during the latter half of the meeting. The crossed out text references a motion to create investment corporations that was eventually replaced with the motion that regional corporations would be in charge of their own “revenue-producing activities.” Alice adds her own two cents about the motion that passed unanimously: “maximum opportunity and autonomy to develop in regionals.”

So what does this all mean? To put these notes into context, the House and Senate had just passed their own versions of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. And a joint committee of the House and Senate would convene to hash out the final bill. I can’t help but wonder if the Don Quixote, the ‘idealista,’ in the picture will catch up to Sancho Panza, the ‘realista’ and if Alice Brown saw that ANCSA would be more than a hope or idea; it would be a reality. Or conversely, did she worry that her ideal Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act would be supplanted by an ANSCA bill that could realistically come into law? Or did she simply like the story of Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote? We may never know. In the end, the notes and doodles provide insight into the final months before the passing of ANCSA in December 1971. Plus, we know that she draws fairly well!

And so what do we do? An exhibit was a great idea but not so much the time it would require of us. How do we get somebody else to do the work? And then for some reason, I thought about a specific photograph we have. A photograph of the Harris family: Richard, Kitty, their two boys, and Kitty’s sister in Juneau in 1889. Big sweeping vista of the growing town, family framed in front of their white house on a hill.  And I’d been thinking about this photograph for a while, because the original caption on it had always annoyed me. It was labeled Richard Tighe Harris’s family. But he wasn’t directly related to one of the people in the photograph: his wife’s sister. So shouldn’t it be Kitty Harris’s family?

Well, I don’t need to go on about the feminist perspective on that caption, but you probably see my point. And I’d been toying for a while with the idea that this photograph was well-suited to a variety of interpretations, depending on the cultural, academic, or whatever perspective of the viewer. And so an exhibit was born, with a relatively obvious title.  We sent out a call, made some direct and rather pointed calls, assigned a few archives employees to write interpretations, nagged a few faculty into it by promising them it would be good for their tenure files, and just nagged some other people until they did something. The results of that exhibit are available here.

So come late August 2009, and we decided why not do another one? We picked a couple of photographs, showed them around to staff of the library and when it was clear the votes for one were “yes” and the votes for the other were “huh?” we picked the first and sent out the call again. This time many of our contributors volunteered pieces all on their own. Side note: I haven’t yet posted the results of that exhibit, but if you’d like to see the photo and the call for participation on that one, it’s here. If I manage to get the whole exhibit online, I’ll be sure to update this entry.

Not so oddly, aside from the “this was fun!” the only piece of feedback we received in quantity was that we give people more time. Apparently the first month of the semester is not exactly the best time to ask people to meet deadlines for new creative work. Now, I tend to believe that the more time you give people, the more likely they are to forget that they promised to do something (or maybe that’s just me), but I try to be responsive and so here we go.

EOTB3 photo

This year’s photograph. For details on how to submit an entry, or what you might consider doing for an entry, or if you’d like to read more about what we know about the photograph, or to look at a bigger version of it, that’s all available on our Call for Submissions.

Note that due date! We look forward to seeing what you have for us.

I have been steadily working on Alice’s papers and am really enjoying it!  But I needed to stop and share some of the interesting things I’m seeing, learning, and doing.  First of all, Alice did a wonderful job of keeping her records in a particular order.  It didn’t come in meticulous filed papers with perfectly typed and color coded tabs most often seen in organizational/business records. Instead, Alice’s papers came in with wonderful description and a series of distinct groupings.  She grouped records according to how she worked with these records, thus providing insight into how she worked.  Correspondence tended to be segregated into its own little group.  My best guess for why she did so was to help her keep track of conversations and remember to respond to certain letters.  This would explain why some letters made it into organization related folders.  In addition, some of the correspondence did not clearly refer to just one of the many organizations she actively represented and participated. But all the letters addressed to Alice E. Brown (or Mrs. Elmer Brown) relate to her advocacy for Alaska Native rights.  And it was through her multiple roles that she worked to advocate for Alaska Natives and underrepresented peoples.  Some of these roles include being a:

• member of the Alaska Federation of Native’s (AFN) board of directors since the inception of the AFN
• field representative of the Kenai Indian Association
• active member of the National Congress of American Indians, Cook Inlet Native Association, and Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indians of Alaska
• member of the Alaska state sponsored Land Task Force
• active member in the Anchorage Democratic Club, a delegate at the South Central Democratic District Convention in Seward in 1967, and serving as an election counter
• board member of the Jesse Lee Home and Hope Cottage
• member of the Greater Anchorage Area Borough Advisory Health Board
• member of the Rural Affairs Commission during Hickel and Egan administrations

Her participation in a diverse group of Alaska Native and Indian organizations, state committees, and educational boards illustrate multiple and simultaneous pathways Alice traveled to reach the same destination: equality and justice for Alaska Natives and all underrepresented peoples.

Serendipity has been the catch phrase in the archives these recent months. All sorts of serendipitous events have occurred within this past year, one of which is the accession of the Alice E. Brown Papers. Rebecca Lyon came into the Archives to do some research on her grandmother, Alice Brown, in order to nominate her to the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame. During her visit, Arlene Schmuland, head of Archives and Special Collections, expressed an interest in one day being a home for Alice Brown’s papers. Alice was involved from the beginning of the AFN as a member of their Board of Directors. As with most discussions with possible donors, we hoped that eventually those discussions would result in the collection becoming a part of the archives collection and made available to researchers. So we prepared to patiently wait for that day. To our surprise and excitement, Rebecca donated her grandmother’s papers on December 18, 2009. In addition, Alice Brown was also elected into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame, class of 2010.

As Arlene re-foldered the collection, copying any descriptions onto the folders, Arlene came up with the brilliant idea to seek grant funding to process the Brown collection at a more detailed level. Serendipity once again came along (mainly through Rebecca’s hard work) and Arlene was encouraged to apply for a Cook Inlet Region Inc. (CIRI) Heritage Foundation grant to do the processing. To make a long story short, we got the funding! I have been working on the Alice E. Brown papers for three weeks now and we have a basic finding aid online right now. I will be adding more detailed information as I continue to process so check the finding aid often to see if any updates have been added. Also I’ll be doing my best to document my processing journey through Alice’s papers on this blog. So please check in once in a while for the latest on my Alice E. Brown processing journey.

Back to the beginning. Two years ago (about) Tim Miller, an educator out in Bethel, was in town for a workshop we sponsored with the Library of Congress on using primary sources in the classroom, taught by a great friend of mine, Danna Bell-Russel.  Shortly after the workshop, Tim contacted me and said he and his siblings were cleaning out his dad’s house after his dad had died, and were we interested in his dad’s (Fletcher Miller’s) papers? That’s the first nice touch of serendipity: would this have occurred to the family to have these materials preserved and made available for research if Tim hadn’t taken that workshop here at the Consortium Library? Anyway, I said quite possibly we’d like the papers, what are they about? And Tim told me that his dad was one of the first beekeepers in Anchorage and he’d done a lot of work to found and work with local beekeeping associations, get agricultural legislation regarding apiculture passed here in Alaska, and did a lot of educational work both with schoolchildren here in Anchorage and with other Anchorage residents. Well, agriculture in Alaska, a very specific type of agriculture in Alaska, and of course I said yes, the very uniqueness of these materials makes preserving them for research access very important.

So shortly after that, I picked up the papers, brought them into the archives, sorted them and removed various and assorted dead bees and dead bee parts, and got them into new boxes and placed in the vault. And that’s about where I stopped. The papers were relatively orderly but I just wasn’t able to break out the time to do a collection description.

Fast-forward to about two months ago. When an email came across the library listserv from our head of the Alaska Medical Library. The email said: I have a library grad student here who is working on an internship/practicum and she’d like to interview the other department heads here, and oh, if we had a small project for her to do, she might be interested.  Well, I almost never turn down an offer to expand the education of an allied professional (much less get some extra work done) and I waved my hand. And in time, Sigrid Brudie showed up and said “what can I do for you?” And I mentioned the Fletcher Miller papers. 12 cubic feet, rough arrangement, needs a collection-level description and a processing survey.

To give Sigrid credit, she didn’t run away. That’s a pretty good-sized project for a short period of time. And though she gently pointed out that she knew nothing about beekeeping, that didn’t work as an objection because none of the rest of us knew anything about beekeeping either and somebody was going to have to do it. So with a little cajoling from us, she took it on. And did a great job. And managed to learn quite a bit about beekeeping in Alaska in the interim, which is one of the side-effects of archival work: the gathering of knowledge on some occasionally arcane topics. Sigrid went from “beekeeping?” to “you have to see this letter!” quite quickly. And wrote up a spectacular condition report on the collection as well as gathering all of the information we needed to produce our basic collection finding aid. For the moment, it’s a rather short finding aid. The collection will need somebody to go through and do some preservation work. For example, a lot of materials are in Ziploc bags, probably because they were stored in the same shed as all of Fletcher’s beekeeping supplies [cf the dead bee clean-out noted above] and those should be removed. The collection also contains a lot of duplicate copies, partly because Mr. Miller taught a lot of community and school classes so he had a lot of copies of handouts that he’d share. So we might actually be able to reduce the size overall of the collection somewhat as staffing and time allows. And hopefully do some more in-depth description to build on and use some of the information Sigrid synthesized from the collection.

Sigrid with the collection

Here’s the serendipity part. Sigrid finished up her portion of the work early last week. And sent me electronic files of the documents she’d produced. I was on leave the last half of last week, but the first thing on my to-do list for this Monday morning was to fill out the standard finding aid form with the information Sigrid had provided. And just as I got started on that task, an email from Sigrid arrived. Our local NPR station runs a weekly call-in show called “Hometown, Alaska.” And apparently this very week, they are doing the show on beekeeping in Alaska! Sigrid wasn’t convinced by my attempts to get her to call in, so since I wasn’t getting anywhere with her, Monday afternoon I emailed the host of the show and told her about the Miller papers and how these were now available. Tuesday afternoon Teeka Ballas, the host of the show, stopped by to take a look at the Miller papers and Wednesday morning, a link to the collection finding aid was up on the KSKA program site. That’s a nice little piece of outreach for us.

It’s about two hours to showtime as I’m writing this and we are planning on listening in. If nothing else, maybe we’ll all walk away with more knowledge about beekeeping in Alaska. And if any future collections come in that pertain to the topic, none of us are going to be able to say we know nothing about it!

One last quick note about the picture of Sigrid. She’s standing in front of the collection in our vault. In her left hand is a portrait of Fletcher Miller in his front yard in Anchorage with a “bee beard.” In her right hand is Fletcher’s queen cage. It’s a small wooden box with a cutout in the center and some screening over the open sides. Beekeepers will put the queen bee in there, tie the box under their chin, and then the bees congregate, thus building the bee beard that you can see in the portrait.

3:30 pm: quick update on the show. The collection was indeed mentioned and in an interesting way: Teeka noted something she’d read in the collection about a treatment for a bee disease and asked her guests if it worked. Turns out it’s out of date, no surprise there with a collection of older materials, but still a nice moment when she acknowledged the tomes of material held here.

Ah… thank you Megan for the nice teaser!  There are numerous treasures in the Arliss Sturgulewski papers! Arliss came to Alaska in 1952 for a two week vacation and stayed.  Her vacation quickly morphed into a career and years of public service. She has served Alaska in a variety of ways: at the Anchorage municipal level; statelevel as a legislator, and at the community and educational level with her work with organizations and committees. The Arliss Sturgulewski papers reflect many of the roles she played in Alaskan history and the hard work and diligence it took to fill those roles.  It also reflects the aides and volunteers who worked tirelessly to make things happen.

The commitment to run a campaign prior to the existence of email, campaign websites, RSS feeds, and social networking was something I thought little of until I processed series 2 of Arliss’ papers: the campaign files.  What I saw was a vast network of knowledge that was: not keyword searchable, relied on stamps to mail campaign information to constituents, and a paper filing system that coincided with their work flow.  One such example would be the volunteer files in the gubernatorial campaign papers.  If you are looking for volunteer files from 1986 in the 1986 gubernatorial portion of the box list, you probably won’t find them.  You will find them down in the 1990 gubernatorial portion of the box list. Why? Archivists try their best to retain the original order the donor or the organization arranged their papers.  If the campaign workers kept the 1986 volunteer files with the 1990 volunteer files, archivists have to do the same.  Doing so preserves the context in how information was used. In the case of these volunteer files, campaign workers needed a ‘database’ of volunteers.  Their database consisted of papers filed in a way that would be useful to them.  This includes using information from the 1986 volunteer files to find campaign volunteers who would be willing to help out for the 1990 campaign.  In addition to the interfiling, they had to integrate new volunteers files into their filing system.

This is not to say that there were no computers during the years Aliss ran for senator and governor.  While you look through materials throughout the collection, you may find notes written in the margins “entered into database,” or papers grouped together as “not entered into database.” So there was definitely a computer somewhere.  And we definitely have some computer storage media transferred to us, such as the optical disc (CD); floppy disk (3 ½ disk, which I used to call a ‘hard disk’ in the early days); and the original 5 ¼ floppy disk. Computers must have seemed like a gigantic step towards efficiently running a campaign.  It definitely helps today.  The thing is…as efficient as computers are, sometimes accessibility can be an issue.  Files on the 5 ¼ disks are totally unreadable, while the papers that date as far back as 1954 and 1967 are still readable.  Suddenly, the fact that the 1986 volunteer files grouped along with the 1990 files, while everything was divided by campaign year, doesn’t seem so weird.  Trying to find a computer with a 5 ¼ drive that works on this campus?  According to one of our wonderful systems computer guru, that’s just crazy.