Wrangell Museum will soon launch website featuring digitized collection

Nolan Center Director Jeanie Arnold in the Wrangell Museum storage room on May 29, 2026. (Page Hoyt / Wrangell Sentinel)

By Anna Lionas

For the Wrangell Sentinel

The Wrangell Museum is launching a new website that will feature access to an online catalog listing thousands of items in the collection. The new feature at nolancenter.com is under construction and will be rolled out in the next month or so, Nolan Center Director Jeanie Arnold said.

The new catalog system, CatalogIt, was implemented earlier this year and replaces the antiquated platform previously used, making it easier to search the artifacts and photos not currently on display.

“I can access it from anywhere as long as I have service,” said DaNika Smalley, who worked as the museum’s collections manager until last month. “It’s so much more user friendly, so much better.”

Long a repository for Wrangell’s culture and history, the museum often serves as a holding place for important family heirlooms and artifacts that need a safe home. “We’re catching a part of the past,” Arnold said.

Much of the collection is comprised of photographs, papers and other delicate items that are stored in drawers for their protection, so having a simple way of accessing them digitally without fear of damaging or skipping over them is a must.

“You can be in this profession for 20 or 30 years and you’ll still come across new things that you didn’t quite know were on a shelf in the back. It’s such a fun part of this job,” Arnold said.

The subscription to CatalogIt costs $500 a year, covered by the museum budget. Arnold said she’s hopeful they will be able to sustain the service because it’s important to the community.

Once the website is up, anyone will be able to access CatalogIt to view the museum’s collection from anywhere. 

The software was designed, marketed and is serviced by a national company with more than 200 museums and collections already signed up.

It’s been almost six months since the museum welcomed CatalogIt and Arnold, Smalley and Nolan Center Coordinator Amber Wade have been working to get the system up to speed. It’s a major undertaking going through the system and updating the information for each piece, like where it’s located in the museum or storage, who owns it and when it was brought in.

Smalley took the lead of checking on the status of items on loan to the museum, which make up a majority of the collection. The previous system didn’t notify staff if a loan was up for renewal, sometimes going back decades.

Over the past four months, she contacted dozens of original owners of loaned items, sometimes reaching their next of kin if the person is deceased, to remind them of the loan and see if they want to renew it.

A lot of legalities surround items loaned to the museum, Smalley said. If one of the people who signed off has passed, then the paperwork is invalid — even if another living person’s name is on the loan.

For years, details like this went unnoticed because of the old catalog system. CatalogIt, however, has a folder with a list of all the loan items that staff is slowly working their way through, a tedious task that often unearths unique connections.

Sisters-in-law with the same name, letters written more than a century ago and links to her own family history all came up in the past few months of Smalley’s work. Going through the loaned items is also a means of clearing space in the storage room, which is pretty much as full as it can get, Smalley and Arnold said.

There are numerous items that were brought in long ago and take up a lot of space while not being relevant to Wrangell. There are also duplicates or multiples of the same item that could be pared down to allow for other items to be brought into the collection.

The online catalog helps staff visualize what they already have to inform decisions about what else to bring in. Staff use a multitude of factors when assessing if an item should be added to the collection, but the main consideration is its relevance to Wrangell.

Sometimes they get keepsake items that belonged to people who lived in Wrangell but the object isn’t directly tied to the community, therefore it’s not in the museum’s scope, Smalley said.

“It is really a case-by-case basis,” Arnold said. “Sometimes for me that’s the toughest ‘no’ I have to give.”

An easy “yes” was working with the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska as a place to house and display repatriated items. Because of its humidity and temperature-controlled environment, the museum is often the safest place for items in Wrangell.

Recently, the museum welcomed a Kadashan Mortuary Totem Pole that was returned from the Princeton University Art Museum in July 2025.

The totem was originally taken from Old Wrangell in 1879 by Sheldon Jackson. According to the museum, the pole’s removal caused immediate tension and was challenged by Chief John Kadashan, according to documentation by naturalist John Muir.

The totem is on loan to the museum from the Kadashan family.

Though its return was somewhat unexpected, staff jumped at the chance to bring it in and put it on display in the Nolan Center lobby, where staff have more flexibility and room for exhibits.

Anyone who has been to the museum knows the main exhibits are pretty fixed and don’t allow for a lot of variance, which limits what staff can rotate out of storage at a given time.

“They (Kadashan family) wanted it to stay in the museum for safekeeping and education, exposure and enriching the community,” Arnold said. “I feel very honored that we’re a safe space for them and they trust us to caretake and to make sure that those items are protected properly.”

Soon, the website will be another way for people in Wrangell, in Alaska and around the world to view items like the Kadashan Mortuary Totem Pole, helmets worn by firefighters during the devastating 1952 fire that took out much of downtown, or a detailed model of the Alaska ferry Taku.

Ronan Rooney has brought Wrangell’s history to the masses since 2020 with his podcast and blog “Wrangell History Unlocked.” Rooney said the museum’s photo archive has been a “game changer” for his research and storytelling.

“It’s the next best thing to a time machine,” he said. “It has answered so many questions. Things I read about but couldn’t visualize, people I had read about but never seen.”

The new CatalogIt system, which he’s helping to update, has been a boon. Searching for images became much easier, a task Smalley said was next to impossible with the old system.

But Rooney thinks there’s still room for improvement in the way pictures are tagged on the website, a feature that makes them searchable by keywords.

“It’s just such a landmark step forward for the museum to have this type of information, he said. “It is just so responsive and easy to use, and I’ve found that I think it’s going to really open people’s minds to a lot of Wrangell history and Alaska history, too.”

• This article originally appeared in the Wrangell Sentinel.