Preparing for digital file migration

Just received word today that everything is now in place to transition live hosting of our digital files to the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. While ARSC has been providing secure backup for some time now, a new server will now provided dedicated access. In the new system files which are not accessed often will be stored on tape backup, possibly creating a short delay for users. However, this procedure will essentially remove our capacity limit, solving the problems we ran into last fall which caused us to take most of our audio files offline.

Users should not be directly affected by this migration and will still access digital files from our catalog interface.

New Publication received

Thanks to Igor Krupnik of the Smithsonian Institution ANLA has just received a copy of Faces We Remember / Neqamiqegkaput by Igor Krupnik and Vera Kaneshiro. The book is a catalog of more than 140 historical photographs from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian which have been carefully annotated and identified. The photographs are striking, and the ethnographic information gives context and meaning to what were originally unidentified images.

The book has been cataloged as ANLA Item SY000K2011

Alaska Library Association Conference

The 2012 meeting of the Alaska Library Association will include a panel devoted to the Alaska Native Language Archive. This panel discussion will highlight the teaching and resource materials available from ANLA. The discussion will also include the history and mission of the Alaska Native Language Center, as well as issues of access, collection development, and importance of the materials held by ANLA.

The panel is scheduled for Saturday, February 25, 2:30-4:00 pm at the Westmark Hotel in Fairbanks.

A preliminary program can be downloaded at http://www.akla.org/fairbanks2012/program1.php

If you are interested in participating in this panel, please contact the Archive Director as soon as possible.

Archive statistics

Every wonder how ANLA resources are distributed across languages and contributors? If so, see our new statistics page at

http://www.uaf.edu/anla/about/statistics

Holiday Closure Dec 26 - Jan 4

The Archive will be closed to the public during the UAF holiday closure, December 26 through January 4. Requests for information sent by email will be attended to as soon as possible.

Happy Holidays from the Alaska Native Language Archive.

uaf-anla-dept@alaska.edu

Legends of the Gwich'in of the Western Arctic

Today we received a set of CD's titled Legends of the Gwich'in of the Western Arctic: Stories from the people of the Mackensie and Peel Rivers. The set includes one Gwich'in and one English CD. The legends were written into radio dramas and aired on CBC Radio in 2009 and 2010. Feel free to stop by and listen! Thanks to the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute for providing these CD's.

Bering Bridge

Sometimes we run across rather interesting items unrelated to language. The commemorative flags pictured above were found during the move of our off-site storage last week. They appear to come from the Bering Bridge Expedition of 1989, however I have been unable to locate similar photos in order to confirm this. The Bering Bridge Expedition was a joint Russian-American crossing of the Bering Strait by dogsled. It was led by Paul Schurke, who three years earlier had accompanied Will Steger on a dogsled expedition to the North Pole. The trip came just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the media attention led to greater easing of travel restrictions between Alaska and Russia. However, some two decades later regular travel between Alaska and the Russian Far East has yet to develop.