Carle, Daria O.

Kazzimir, Edward

Rozen, Celia M.

English

One of the more unique holdings in the Alaska Resources
Library and Information Services (ARLIS) stands out due to its
extensive size and breadth—the CommFish collection. The entire
management history related to Alaska's commercial fisheries is
documented here, including controversies over fishing rights,
subsistence, and much more. These reports, including primary source
data reported nowhere else, precede statehood and capture in great
detail the extent, scope, successes, failures, policy decisions, and
inventories of Alaska's fisheries statewide.
When statehood was realized in 1959, the agency responsible for
managing commercial fisheries was also established: the Alaska
Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). Fishery managers in the
newly created agency recognized early on that much of the data
compiled would be of professional interest, while other information 
clearly had a public right-to-know component. As a result, a diverse
number of series to meet each of these information needs was initially
established. Over time, however, these series have been subject to the
familiar vagaries common to all gray literature, such as title changes,
name irregularities, and murky bureaucratic authorship.
ARLIS inherited these extensive collections from several ADF&G
libraries over a period of years. Most of the items had never been
distributed outside of the agency, and ARLIS often owns the only copy.
Recently, ARLIS has spent much time and effort to provide original
cataloging for these materials in OCLC. ARLIS’ approach to
cataloging these complex series may also be of interest to librarians
facing similar challenges

ScholarWorks@UA

COMMFISH: all about Alaska's commercial fisheries collections

Woods Hole Open Access Server

https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/bitstream/11122/6559/1/Carle_IAMSLIC2008.pdf

COMMFISH: all about Alaska's commercial fisheries collections

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