The meeting dates are:
Archives 1, in Washington, DC, Thursday July 7, 2:00-3:00 Room G-24
Archives 2, in College Park, MD, Tuesday July 12, 10:00-11:00 Lecture Room B

Feel free to share some of your ideas here, too, if you cannot attend the meetings.

After the establishment of the Products and Services (P&S) web portal resource in 2010 (see the http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/?p=5320 blog post), Digitization Services knew we still had more work to do in 2011 to achieve our goals. Now that we standardized what we make and why, we want to make our products with more precision and consistency. In short, we need to focus on building an infrastructure and culture that values and supports quality. To start realizing this goal, we have initiated a year-long Quality Assurance and Quality Control project which seeks to accomplish three things:

1. Document our quality “As Is” state including detailing our current knowledge base and system capability.
2. Determine our quality “To Be” state including specific thresholds and measurement mechanisms.
3. Develop a plan to transform the” As Is” state into “To Be” state.

To keep our focus, we have time boxed our project scope from March through December 2011. For those items which we cannot complete during this time frame, we expect to have a well-defined approached to continue our work in the future.

Some of the things we want to accomplish through this project are to

• Establish division-wide quality baselines utilizing specific quality control thresholds for all current products outlined in the Products and Services (P&S) web portal: http://www.archives.gov/preservation/products/.
• Document the quality thresholds for individual products within the P&S structure.
• Establish appropriate technical metadata (embedded and/or external) for each product including process metadata and audit trails to record and track quality events.
• Author and implement standard operating procedures (SOPs) for relevant tasks and equipment.
• Develop a system to optimize equipment and systems including calibration, monitoring and preventative maintenance.
• Map equipment capabilities to specific products listed in P&S.
• Identify system infrastructure requirements needed to support the QA/QC effort (metrics gathering, metrics reporting, system alerts, audit trail, business records).
• Identify areas of ongoing focus in quality assurance and quality control work and build support for these beyond the life of the project.

It’s a big job! And we can’t do it alone. We want to hear your thoughts on pursuing quality in a digitization and reformatting environment. We have established an invitation only External Review Committee (ERC) comprised of primarily non-NARA stakeholders with subject matter expertise in specific areas (digital still images/text, digital moving images, audio, and motion picture film) to be a sounding board for the QA/QC project as well as an information exchange venue to discuss various approaches to and implementations of quality actions. We’ve strived to include participants from a variety of disciplines including the cultural heritage, entertainment and broadcast communities as well as from a range of countries including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark. NARA is interested in the individual opinions and experiences of ERC members so NARA can determine if/how they can work within our business environment. The ERC as a group will not issue a final report, make recommendations or endorse products/processes. While ERC discussion may include references to commercial products, the ERC is not a venue to advertise products. We’ve limited the participants on the ERC for logistical reasons but we want to engage other interested parties as well. Through this blog, we’ll announce occasional project updates as well milestones and results. We welcome your comments and questions.

Quality isn’t something that is achieved once and it’s done forever. It’s a continual and communal process and your participation is an important component to help us reach our goals.

1940 Census: col. 22: “Was [this person]  at work on, or assigned to, public EMERGENCY WORK (WPA, NYA, CCC, etc.) during week of March 24-30? (Y or N)

Youth on relief in Haward, California, April 17, 1940. Still Pictures, National Archives. ARC ID 532121.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the National Youth Administration (NYA) as one of his New Deal agencies, to provide aid to a country trying to lift itself out of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies also included the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), but neither of them addressed the problem facing the nation’s unemployed youth. The WPA provided public works jobs for unskilled workers, but did not initially provide training in new jobs skills. The typical WPA worker was the head of household of relief families, which sometimes included women. The CCC typically provided unemployed, unmarried young men ages 18-25 (but not women) on the relief rolls work constructing state parks and other conservation projects.

"Miss Juanita E. Gray learns to operate a lathe machine at the Washington, DC NYA War Production and Training Center." Still Pictures, National Archives. ARC ID 535809.

NYA created a means for young men and women between 16 and 24 who had finished school and were unemployed to work and develop skills that they could use to continue working once they finished the program. Their work ranged from building bridges, schools, and furniture for schools to nursing and junior clerks. Others worked in agricultural and industry.

Original caption: "Sunshine and knowledge to the less fortunate through NYA." Young woman tutoring a younger girl, ca. 1936. Still Pictures, National Archives. ARC ID 197140.

Participants in the NYA accompanied their work with studies related to their jobs, which allowed them to prepare for things such as the civil service examinations and homemaking. The most important thing provided to many NYA participants was job experience.

"Work experience in aviation for NYA boys": Two youth working on the propellor section of a plane, ca. 1938. Still Pictures, National Archives. ARC ID 195861.

Further textual and photographic records concerning the National Youth Administration  and other New Deal agencies can be found in Archives II in College Park (RG 119), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, and the Tugwell Room in the Greenbelt branch of the Prince Georges County public library. The library in Archives II also has a number of books dealing specifically with the NYA.

If you had relatives who worked for the NYA during the Depression, these records will provide more insight into their experiences!

Please note that attendees should enter the building via the Special Events entrance located on Constitution Avenue and 7th Street, NW.

We hope to see you there!

Ready to give it a try?

To begin adding tags, visit OPA’s registration page and register by entering your preferred username, email address, and password.   Log in, run a search, and look for the “Add Tag” box on the left side of the screen.  Start tagging!

Letter from Mary Greenhow Lee to Rose Greenhow, ca. 1861 (ARC ID 1634068)

Newly created tags will be reviewed to ensure they meet the National Archives’ tagging policy guidelines, and will be visible the day they are approved and indexed overnight.  In addition to the new user registration and tagging features in OPA, we’ve also made some fixes to the system, such as adding the Record Group and/or Collection information to the full displays for archival descriptions, as well as the Level of Description.

So, what’s next?  Would you be interested in a tagging event?  We’d love to organize “tagging missions” to encourage groups of users to contribute tags within a specific Record Group or subject area!  What kinds of missions would you be interested in participating at the National Archives?

We invite you to register for an account in OPA and start tagging!  We will be rolling out two more releases in the next few months, with additional functionality and features.  Please send us your feedback at search@nara.gov.  Happy tagging!

June 18, 2011 marks the 199th anniversary of the beginning of the War of 1812.

On June 18, 1812, in Washington, DC, the U.S. Congress declared war against Great Britain. On about the same date, nearly 3,400 miles away, at Dublin, Ireland, 83 Irish men, women, and children, and 3 American men boarded the Vermont, an American sailing ship captained by Samuel C. Nicoll of Stratford, Connecticut. The Vermont was bound for New York. No one on board knew that war had started.

On July 15, 1812, Captain Frederick Lee, commanding the U.S. Revenue Cutter Eagle, spied four large sailing vessels off of Long Island, New York, that he suspected were British warships. Two days later he saw the Vermont, and signaled her to stop and be boarded. Captain Nicoll and his passengers now learned about the war. Nicoll produced a passenger list and cargo manifest, dated “at sea, June 19th, 1812,” which Lee took, and it became part of the records of the Collector of Customs at New London, Connecticut.

This chance encounter resulted in the preservation of the Vermont’s passenger list which otherwise would have been lost to history. The U.S. Federal Government did not require passenger lists to be submitted to collectors of customs until January 1, 1820, so there are relatively few pre-1820 passenger lists in the National Archives. A transcript is provided below.

The Vermont’s passenger list has been reproduced on National Archives Microfilm Publication M2095, Lists of Passengers Arriving at and Departing from the District of Fairfield, Connecticut, 1804–1889 (1 roll). Part of Record Group 36, Records of the U.S. Customs Service, 1745 – 1997, M2095 is available at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, as well as many of our regional facilities. The original records that were microfilmed as M2095 are located at The National Archives at Boston.

For more information on War of 1812 records in the national Archives, see our website.

During the Civil War, Federal authorities  took immediate steps to document the Union dead–which led in part to the creation of our current system of national cemeteries (perhaps an appropriate topic for a future blog)–but it was not until the 1890s, well after the war ended, that officials finally accepted responsibility to render an accurate accounting of the Confederate dead as well.  Beginning in 1898, President William McKinley advocated such an effort and also promoted the care of Confederate graves located in the North.  In 1900, Congress appropriated money to establish a Confederate section in Arlington National Cemetery, and re-interred 264 remains from other locations within Arlington and the National Soldiers Home cemetery.  By 1901, Confederate veterans organizations also called for a uniform system of federal care for all Confederate graves in Northern cemeteries.

Accordingly, a federal statute of March 9, 1906 (34 Stat. 56) established the Office of the Commissioner for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead, which was charged with  identifying the graves of Confederate combatants who had died in the North as prisoners of war and had been buried near their places of confinement. Responsibilities were later expanded to include the marking of Confederate civilians’ graves located in the North among those of Confederate combatants, and also responsibility of erecting monuments in the North containing names of Confederate combatants and civilians whose graves could not be located. The office was terminated upon submission of a final report dated October 23, 1912, which was published the next year as the “Register of Confederate Soldiers and Sailors” mentioned above.   Reactivated by Senate Joint Resolution 90 (38 Stat. 768), March 14, 1914, to mark the graves of all Confederate combatants and civilians buried in national and post cemeteries, the  Office of the Commissioner for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead continued until March 13, 1918.

The Confederate burial register included lists arranged by the name of the prison camp or other location where the deaths occurred, such as the above image showing Confederate prisoners who died at Fort McHenry in Baltimore while in Union custody.  Individual burial lists were arranged alphabetically by the name of the deceased and generally gave the rank, company, regiment, date of death, and number and location of the grave for each individual interred.  Some of the burial lists contained incomplete information, especially for cemeteries where the dead were not buried in numbered graves.  In those cases, regimental and company designations, as well as some dates of death, were not always included.  Some of the burial entries also referred to unknown graves or to bodies that were later disinterred and reburied elsewhere.  Such entries often contained notations indicating the remains were “sent home” or “taken home by friends.”

When you signed up as a researcher at the National Archives, what did our staff pull out of the stacks for you? Was it a photo of your great-grandfather with the Secretary of War as he received a commendation? Or did you find a telegraph your favorite president sent at the height of his career? We want to hear about the most memorable experience you’ve had researching with our archivists, and we want your fellow researchers to get inspired too.

For exactly this reason, the National Archives is proud to offer our take on the Society of American Archivists’ recent “I Found it in the Archives” contest . Whether you’ve been searching our holdings in Philadelphia or Oklahoma City, Anchorage or Washington, D.C., if you’ve visited a National Archives facility to do research or have been aided long-distance to find records that you need, we want to hear about the most important document we’ve helped you find.

Entering the contest is simple. You can either submit a 400-word written essay or a short (< two minutes) video. Whichever medium you choose, we ask that you describe your quest for information and explain why finding it has made a difference for you.

Submissions will be accepted June 9th through August 9th and public voting will take place August 23 through September 13th. Winners will be announced September 16th in celebration of Constitution Day. For more information and details on how to enter, please visit our info page or the I Found It in the National Archives Tumblr blog. Entries can be sent via email or post, or uploaded directly on Tumblr. We look forward to hearing what you’ve found in the National Archives!

2010 was a year of introspection and change for us. Inspired in part by the Open Government Initiative as well as our own organizational needs, we took a good long look at what it is we do and why we do it. We questioned the status quo and the “this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude to critically rethink our reformatting products and how we can best use our currently available resources to meet the needs of our internal NARA customers.

Inspecting motion picture film elements

So, where are we now?  One prominent outcome of this transformation is the creation of the Products and Services or P&S web portal. This resource puts our customer front and center in the reformatting process. For example, typically customers know what they have to start with (say, a black and white 35mm photographic negative) and have an idea of what they need to accomplish when they contact us (say, get a digital file that can be used for publication on the web). They may not realize however that a low resolution compressed file suitable for online publication  may not be successfully repurposed for long term preservation or even just making a decent quality hard copy print out. P&S strives to bridge this information gap between archival staff and technical staff.

The heart of P&S is a series of summary charts for each of the original record formats handled by the division. Each chart starts with the expected reformatting end use which is mapped to one of three product categories:  preservation master, reproduction master and distribution copy. Each product within the category includes technical specifications to assure that NARA’s products align with institutional guidelines, industry standards and published best practices.

This approach exposes the technical details about possible product choices so that customers are informed partners with the technical experts in the decision-making process. P&S also has benefits for the Special Media Preservation Division in that it allows us to standardize and consolidate our resources and our quality assurance and quality control criteria and methods. More on this soon!

Reformatting equipment in the video lab

P&S was published to the NARA intranet in November 2010 and now it is available to the general public through Archives.gov. While we do not perform work or services for non-NARA customers, we believe this information will be valuable to peer institutions and the general public with in interest in reformatting and digitization efforts.

Let us know what you think!  We invite your comments about P&S including feedback on our product options.

RG 127 - Records of the U.S. Marine Corps, UD-04D, Entry 1 -- Korean War Air/Ground Units, 1946-1962; File Unit: 7th Marine Historical Diary, April 1951

Why are we making this change?  We are making this change to more easily delineate which papers were copied on NARA equipment or printed out at one of the public use PC printers, and which papers might be actual record material. Since we first discussed this change at the November Researcher Users Group meeting (see item V in the minutes), we have been experimenting with more than a dozen different colors of paper to see which provided the best clarity. The Windsor Blue paper is pale enough to minimize the distortion of the image, but blue enough to be easily detected and to help prevent actual records from getting mixed or confused with photocopies.

Copies made by NARA staff or contractors outside of the research room area will continue to be made on white paper, including copies made for certification.  We will also continue to use white paper in the color copier in the Still Picture reference room on the fifth floor of the National Archives at College Park.

For more information about this change, please read our frequently asked questions at  http://www.archives.gov/dc-metro/blue-paper-copying-faqs.html