Friday at the PLC

The last day of the Colloquy led off win three interesting sessions on collaborative projects.

Bridget Burke, University of Alaska Fairbanks, introduced us to Project Jukebox. This collection of oral history projects captures local knowledge and returns it to the community: "digital repatriation." Materials collected include audio files, transcripts, video clips, polar periodicals, and images. University and library staff travel to communities to give presentations, and elders travel to the library to identify and prioritize materials for digitization. Interactions with local communities are regulated by guidelines that require collaboration. An unintended consequence has been increased collaboration and trust between groups within the University library, who have been forced to work together.

Liisa Hallikainen, from the Arctic Centre library, spoke on a cooperative outreach effort of the library, the Arctic Centre's science center, the Rovaniemi Art Museum, the Provincial Museum of Lapland, and the science center of Metsahallitus (parks and forestry service), which are located around the same square. The organizations are working on a coordinated series of activities for visiting groups of 14-15 year old students around the theme of northern forestry. Students will perform some preliminary work in the classroom; also, all activities conform to the curriculum. The goal for the Arctic Centre Library is to help the students become more capable of using the library as an information source.