Alaska's Digital Archives

Alaska's Digital Archives is a collaborative effort to provide online resources related to Alaskan history and culture suitable for use by researchers and ordinary people interested in Alaska. There are 10,000 items online and these include documents as well as oral histories, maps, film clips and three-dimensional objects. The library is supported by the University of Alaska and the Alaska State Library so sustainability should not be an issue.

You can search by collection, mostly collections from the University of Alask, but including the Sitka tribe's collection as well. The metadata attached to the items is sufficient, although the tags are minimal (the subject of the item at left is "Men"--not very helpful). However, there is no information about the collection itself. Who are the Sitka? What is the backstory of teh collection and why was it chosen for the digitization project? I would have found this information interesting, as would many nonexpert viewers I suspect. It also would have provided insight into the selection process, information not available as it stands now. However, the collection does contain the holding institution's URL so there is an easy way to dig up more information or find someone to contact.

For the items themselves, the functionality is fairly good. The photographs can be manipulated, zoomed in on, and saved to a "favorites" folder. The included metadata varies but it seems as though when it is available the included information is quite extensive (as in this item), but for other items in the tribal collection at least many of the fields are empty and unexplained. Like many of the collections we have seen, the original emphasis was on photographs and (to some extent) documents and they moved into other media later on. The multimedia metadata is not as extensive as the photographs.

The search function is decent, although the advanced search does not allow you to select by year. For example. I looked for "oil" and hit many irrelevent items: however, I was able to refine them through entering "petroleum" instead. One missing function is the capacity for using the subject terms as hyperlinks--I could not just click on "Petroleum," I had to enter it as a search term. Annoying. One positive thing is that both of the collections I looked at contained multimedia items, which are clearly labelled as such and the software requirements delineated in the FAQs.

Overall, the Alaska Digital Library has made a pretty good start, and should be commended for building a collection of diverse digital materials with decent metadata. Additional functionality would be useful for thinking of the collection as a stand-alone digital entity, but the empahsis seems to still be largely on faciliting the use of particular collectioons: hence the proximity-search function and the collection URL. Perhaps the project sees itself as a gateway to the collections? For both the casual user and the researcher, however, one location through which to find the digital resources is a handy thing indeed. Even if for truly comprehensive information a serious researcher would still want to contact the archives directly.