Everything you ever wanted to know about the Exxon Valdez oil spill litigation will soon be online.    The Alaska State Archives has received federal funds to evaluate and make accessible state litigation documents stemming from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Larry Hibpshman is the senior archivist at the Alaska State Archives and he’s directing the project. In five years of litigation, he says, the Alaska Department of Law accumulated millions of pages of documents about the spill.
Archivists started the project on October 1st after receiving nearly 110-thousand dollars in funding for the project from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.  Hibpshman says archivists are determining what to keep for permanent public knowledge and what to dispose of.   He says preserving the documents is important.
Individual documents from the litigation have been available via public information requests, but you had to know exactly what you wanted … the archiving project will make online catalogs available for the documents for the first time.    The project is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2013.
Daysha Eaton is a contributor with the Alaska Public Radio Network.
Daysha Eaton holds a B.A. from Evergreen State College, and a M.A. from the University of Southern California. Daysha got her start in radio at Seattle public radio stations, KPLU and KUOW. Before coming to KBBI, she was the News Director at KYUK in Bethel. She has also worked as the Southcentral Reporter for KSKA in Anchorage.
Daysha's work has appeared on NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered", PRI's "The World" and "National Native News". She's happy to take assignments, and to get news tips, which are best sent via email.
Daysha became a journalist because she believes in the power of storytelling. Stories connect us and they help us make sense of our world. They shed light on injustice and they comfort us in troubled times. She got into public broadcasting because it seems to fulfill the intention of the 4th Estate and to most effectively apply the freedom of the press granted to us through the Constitution. She feels that public radio has a special way of moving people emotionally through sound, taking them to remote places, introducing them to people they would not otherwise meet and compelling them to think about issues they might ordinarily overlook.
