Thanks to a $500,000 matching grant, the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association, known as AMIPA, has begun a statewide program to inventory and assess culturally and historically important media collections throughout Alaska. "We're concerned about Alaskan history," said Francine Lastufka Taylor, AMIPA executive director. "It's all of our history, whether it's about celebrations of statehood in Anchorage or Native history."

Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association preserves important media collections.

The collections may be film footage of a village dance celebration or they may be commercially produced documentary footage, according to Taylor and Kevin Tripp, AMIPA archivist. The hope is that all the important media can be identified to help preserve Alaska's dramatic past of colorful and important events.

The grant is part of a national program called "Save America's Treasures," a public-private partnership between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. Taylor stressed that while the grant is generous, it is a matching grant. So far about $175,000 has been committed for the match, primarily from the State of Alaska and the Municipality of Anchorage.

"We still have to raise approximately $325,000," Taylor said. "We can use some in-kind services as a match as well. Clearly, this is an enormous task, but I believe in our mission, and I believe many others throughout Alaska will feel passionately about it, too."

According to Taylor, many institutions, broadcast stations, federal and state agencies, and corporations do not know the contents of their collections. Materials may be housed in unsafe and inappropriate storage areas, and that could lead to rapid deterioration of what may be priceless and unique film, video, or audio.

Tripp noted that although the program calls for taking an inventory of what collections exist in Alaska, corporations or tribal entities that participate will not be obligated to have their collection published.

"We don't want to take anyone's collection away; we just want to identify them, catalog them and assist with preserving them," he said. "The next phase after the inventory is to put together a preservation plan. We'll seek further funds at that stage of the project."

Taylor's interest in creating AMIPA was sparked after she began working at the University of Alaska Anchorage as a documentary film producer in the late 1970s. She said UAA produced, among other things, coverage of the Wolf Dance (a co-production with Kawerak, Inc.), performed for the first time in Nome in many years. Later in 1986, the university halted funding for such efforts, and Taylor realized that without staff members who made an effort to preserve it, the valuable Wolf Dance footage could have been lost, along with coverage of other unique, one-of-a-kind events and oral histories.

"It was an abandoned collection," she said. "Not only were the university production facilities gone, but there were no caretakers to maintain the collection, which had not been labeled or archived. Additionally, the formats were changing, along with the equipment."

The Wolf Dance coverage and footage of the Alaska Native Festival of the Arts in Fairbanks are among the first collections in AMIPA's archive.

The film and video not only document events, stories and oral histories, but they are very powerful teaching tools. "Coverage of Native cultural events was very rare in those days, so we would play them in the lobby area of Building K at UAA. They immediately drew groups of Native students who would dance along with the video, learning dances they had never seen before. This kind of use is the real reason we save our past - so we can learn our history, skills of culture and survival, values and traditions,"Taylor said.

AMIPA is developing a questionnaire to send out to agencies and corporations that may have collections. Also, VIA 2002, a conference on how to inventory, assess, and preserve collections, is being planned for Oct. 28-29, following the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention. The location will be the new BP Energy Center, and two of the primary speakers are nationally recognized consultants who specialize in helping smaller, non-profit organizations and individual producers preserve and catalogue their collections.

According to Taylor, because audio, video and film footage can deteriorate within 10 to 20 years - or even sooner - so it's important for Alaskans to get behind the project now. She hopes it inspires people to take a greater interest in Alaskan history.

"We also encourage the continuing documentation of Alaska and its people. What we hope to see is eventually for people to become their own historians, and value their own recording of their own history," she said.

Those interested in further information may contact AMIPA in Anchorage at (907) 279-8433.

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