There's something wrong about a company that shreds documents being called "Alaska Archives."
And since we only just learned recently that the Federal Archives' Alaska holding will be shipped from Alaska to Seattle, it was particularly startling to see this truck next to me at a stop light. I took a very fast picture before the light changed.
[UPDATE June 16, 2014: Pico Alaska links to a 49 Writers story on the impact of the archives moving to Seattle.
In fact, 49 Writers has a whole series on the Archives and how to use them. I guess now it will start with a ticket to Seattle.]
Steve, regarding the ADN/Dispatch story to which you linked: Dermot Cole (like other reporters who've taken a stab at this story) misstates the amount of federal records involved. Besides the 12,000 or so cubic feet of archival material (the number that generally gets mentioned), there's another 7,500 cubic feet of federal records that are presently owned by the agencies that generated them but which will eventually be archived and made accessible to researchers and other members of the public. (National Archives benchmark is that 1 cubic foot = 3,000 pages.) Some of those Alaska-related records won't be released for a long time, but they will become available at some point. And all of them are also going to Seattle. It's not 25 percent of the local facility's holdings that are being sent to Juneau but more like 16 percent. Still, what does this difference really matter? The mass of these records are leaving the state. Permanently. Here's another view of this sad event—http://www.49writers.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-porco-closing-of-archives-hurts.html / Peter Porco
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