Final AYPE Exhibit Tour Tonight

Former AYPE Forestry building being demolished, 1930.

This evening marks your last chance for a free tour of The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: When the World Came to Campus, led by exhibit curator, Carla Rickerson.  No RSVP or pre-registration is necessary for this one-hour event.  Just show up at 6:00 pm in the Suzzallo Library Exhibition Room 102 (just inside the main entrance to the building).

Image credit: Post AYPE Building Collection. PH Coll 778.  University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections Order no. UWCO159

Book Signing Tonight

Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition dust jacket cover

If you are looking for something to do this evening, why not head over to the University Bookstore?  At 7:00 pm, the Special Collections Division’s own Nicolette Bromberg will be on hand to discuss and sign copies of her new book, Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.  This lavish volume features the Visual Materials Curator’s own selection of documentary photographs by AYPE official photographer, Frank Nowell, as well as recent photographs from a project led by John Stamets in which University of Washington students rephotographed various sites of the 1909 exposition on the current UW campus.

You also can see some of Nowell’s images for yourselves at the previously mentioned installations in the University of Washington Libraries and in glorious large-scale format at Picturing the Fair, the exhibition at the Museum of History and Industry.

All over but the shouting

No, I’m not referring to the Replacements or any other ’80s band, but to the fact that the cataloging of  all of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition materials held by Special Collections finally seems to be finished.  Many thanks to the Mendery for liberating several of these publications from a previously “bound together” state and for everyone involved in getting them shelf ready and able to be requested in the reading room.

Contents list and cover from publications formerly bound together

Not that it is something that is necessarily worth getting all that sentimental about, but I cannot help feeling some mixture of chagrin and amusement whenever I am in the position of revising work done by prior hands.  Binding these publications together and describing them briefly all in one record may seem a little questionable now, but it did serve its purpose well enough for many years.  In an information world where everything is evolving so rapidly, how soon will it be before someone questions the decision to catalog these individual publications separately (and in far more detail) and finds that approach a bit dated?

But enough philosophizing, as, drunk with power, I prepare to delete this record from our local catalog.

Screen shot of catalog record to be deleted

Ciao!

Pacific Northwest Historians Guild Call for Presentations

The Pacific Northwest Historians Guild has issued a call for papers and presentations for its 24^th annual conference to be held on March 7, 2009 at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. The theme of this year’s conference is the centennial of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Submissions are due by October 15, 2008. You can go here for the full announcement.