Hi all! Those who have been faithfully following my blog may be a little perplexed that I haven’t posted in a long while. The truth is I’ve been posting blog entries semi regularly. I just haven’t been posting them onto my blog If you are interested in seeing what I’ve been up to in the archives please visit our Archives and Special Collections blog and search for entries written by yours truly.

A delayed publication: written in October!

Last night Arlene, Head of Archives and Special Collection, Coral, the new web librarian, Kevin, AMIPA archivist, and I went to Moose’s Tooth to welcome Coral to the Consortium Library.  Coral and I had already made plans to do the Zombie walk this Saturday while Coral, Kevin, and a few friends will be attending the movie Dead Snow at the Bear Tooth later that night.  Coral is an avid blogger and I admire her for it.  Arlene and Sally have also been regular posters to their blogs and I admire them for that as well.  But I don’t know how they do it!  I tend to be a motormouth in person, speaking a mile a minute, leaving listeners slightly disoriented.  However on paper I tend to clam up.  The best way to describe this phenomenon is that the connect between my brain and my mouth is blocked.  As a result i spend agonizing hours trying reopen the connection.  I know that I have something to say but the channel is a little fuzy.  Perhaps practice would be the best way keep the lines of communication between my mind and my mouth open!

It is always important to try something new.  What I did today

I was at home an found this new tool.  I was trying to figure out ways to provide tutorials that might be fun or marketing that would grab people’s attention.  It was a lot of fun and takes a bit of work in the beginning stages.  First you have to come up with a set of characters and different versions of those characters to convey mood, etc.  Once those characters are created you can pretty much re-use them and develop different stories.  There are some limitations to toonlet.  You are limited to the images uploaded by contributors.  But you can be a contributor too!  So if you can draw, toonlet can come in pretty handy.  The toonlet you create is automatically posted on the website as a png.  You ca save it to your computer by right clicking and “save as” functions.  In addition, you can embed it as well.  Another limitation is that you cannot have more than one person in a comic cell.  This can get frustrating but people who are toonlet comic creators developed a variety of ways to convey person to person interactions.  One interesting suchtoonlet cartoon is by an intrepid library technician working in a computer lab.  She has a series of comic strips devoted to library techisms and library OZ-isms.  She is an interesting character, but I don’t think the cartoon was made for outreach or marketing purposes.  I could be wrong

I am ecstatic that the sun is back in the sky. The temperature is mild with a nice breeze. And I almost feel like I could stand to be outside in nature more than the time it takes to get to my car. However, I am somewhat frustrated with the lack of nighttime. The resulting lack of sleep makes for a very tired Mariecris. But this is part of the adventure of living in Alaska and what is adventure without a little sleep deprivation. Thankfully, it hasn’t hit me till this Solstice weekend! And since Solstice has come and gone, I’m hoping that as the daylight hours get shorter I’ll be able to catch up on some much needed sleep. This is especially important because summer is our busiest time of the year, which also makes it the most exciting time as well. Instructors who are on summer vacation are able to devote time to their own research. The beautiful Alaskan summers definitely attract outside researchers to the archives! (Well, maybe it attracts them to Alaska in general… but they still come in and do research.) While the increased daylight seems to increase motivation to be productive! I have to admit that for the last two months I’ve been a lot more focused. So with some tin foil on my window and getting to bed at a decent hour, I hope to continue on with this productive streak and enjoy the summer and all its surprises! (But I still wish that summer up here didn’t mean giving up nighttime!)

Yesterday was a fairly interesting day… some may say a bit ‘traumatic.’  When I first started working at the Consortium Library, I became involved with disaster preparedness.  (This means I took a few classes.)  One of the the things you learn is that disasters tend to happen on weekends or days when no one is in the building.  So that when Monday or Tuesday (after a three day weekend) rolls along, relaxed unsuspecting archivists/librarians discover a flooded stacks.  Of course, yesterday we were incredibly lucky. Arlene and I were in, while Greg from AMIPA had come in early.  And, it was Greg who immediately found out about the sheet of water streaming into his stacks.  In addition to us 3 were 45 second graders, their teachers, and roughly 4 parent volunteers.  Somewhere, the god of irony is laughing at us.

All in all we weathered this storm.  The records and oversized exhibit photographs  were relatively unharmed.  The boxes took on most of the water.  Students and other library employees pitched in to rehouse the materials in our staging area.  We pulled together as a team and came out learning many important lessons.  There are too many to name.  But one of my favorite ones is we can get things completed quicker, efficiently, and successfully if we all work together.  Of course my other favorite lesson, learned by way of Arlene’s own experience, is to be careful when pulling boxes of the top shelf after a downpour.  You may end up giving yourself or your fellow teammates an impromptu shower!

Greetings blogosphere from an archivist in Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, UAA/APU!  Being new to this realm, I beg your patience in reading my blogs.  I promise to do my best to keep spelling errors to a minimum, curb any comma frenzies, and limit the amount of exclamation points I put in each post to 3.  However, I cannot promise to post consistently interesting and awe inspiring posts.  But I will do my best!  So I hope you read this and come back for future posts! (<-see only 3 exclamations points)