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About Alaskana Explorer

TL:DR version

This project uses the US National Archive Catalog Search API to pull records mentioning Alaska that also have digital objects. It provides a simplified view of fields and provides links to additional material available in the https://catalog.archives.gov/">full National Archives catalog.

This project is not affialiated with the US National Archives. As of March 2018 it was not affilated with any other institution. It started as a personal project of Daniel Cornwall, a librarian, coder and lifelong learner living in Juneau, Alaska. In March 2018, Amy Carney joined the project to work with the user interface, site look and feel and offer suggestions on refactoring the search code.

Motivation for Project

Daniel's motivation for this project was to share the rich digitized treasures that the National Archives has on file for Alaska as a result of Alaska's long history as a US territory. While this can be accessed through the National Archives main catalog, he had the impression that the full catalog and the lengthy metadata listed in full catalog could be intimidating for some users. So Daniel had the idea to provide a search to a subset of records which he hoped would include only digitized items mentioning Alaska. Daniel also wanted to provide some canned searches to key events and topics in Alaska's history.

Implementation

The idea was to create a subset of records for the user to search from that used "Alaska" as a keyword and limited the results to descriptions with online records. The user would then do keyword searches within that subset. In the main National Archives catalog, you can do this by searching for Alaska and then clicking on the "available online tab." It took several approaches and several exchanges with staff at the National Archives to figure out how to do this.

We want to keep the Alaskana Explorer focused on digitized records because we hope it will be a resource for students and other people who prioritize immediate access to objects who will in turn share their finds with others.

This application has several known issues. Please look them over before sending us a bug report.

GitHub Links

This project has a GitHub Repo. Aside from the code for these pages and search scripts, you might be interested in:

Bug Reports

If you had a problem with your search, please submit an issue.

Last updated 03/23/2018