Q. How do I find old pictures online?

If you're looking for photos of Alaska, a great place to start is the Alaska's Digital Archives. Several archives in the state are adding photographs to it almost every day, including our own Archives & Special Collections in the Consortium Library. Even better, it includes movies, oral histories, diaries, and all sorts of other archival materials related to Alaska. Each item in the Digital Archives has contact information for the institution that owns the image and they can help you with things like citing the photo or how you can use it or getting a better copy of it, or even where to find other things on the same topic.

Archives & Special Collections also has picturingUAA, which has a selection of photographs related to UAA and to Anchorage Community College, and UAA's art inventory.

If you're looking beyond Alaska, you have lots of choices when searching the web. Unfortunately, nobody yet has created that one perfect site with a list of all online digital archival collections. But one good search strategy is using the term photographs along with archives and the name of the location you're seeking. Archives and libraries use a variety of software applications to put images online. Flickr is quite popular so that's a good place to search. The Alaska's Digital Archives and picturingUAA are both based on the software ContentDM. ContentDM has over 2000 institutions that use their software and they have a searchable list on their website that could be helpful.

Always remember that not everything may be online! Less than 1% of the Consortium Library's photographs are available through the Digital Archives, though we're trying hard to make it as broadly representative of our holdings as possible. And a lot of archives are able to scan things for you, so if you find something in an archives that isn't online, you should still ask that archives how you can get a digital copy.

And of course, if you're looking for something specific and not finding anything, you're always welcome to contact the librarians and archivists at the Consortium Library for more help too. Just click on the chat button on the right to send us a message.