With the growing hype surrounding the upcoming release of the 1940 Census, it has come to the attention of Archives staff that some misinformation may be starting to appear regarding what type of information you will find in the census and how it will be searchable.  One such tidbit that recently showed up online alleged [...]

The National Archives Trust Fund is replacing current copiers and the copy card system in the research rooms of College Park, MD (Archives II) and Washington, DC (Archives I) in early 2012. The new copiers/scanners will have more features than the current copiers. The new machines produce paper copies and digitized scans that can download [...]

This week’s post comes once again from guest blogger Diane Petro, who is an Archives Technician in the Archives I Research Support Branch (RD-DC), Research Services, Archival Operations – Washington, DC.  Diane helps staff the research rooms at the National Archives Building and has also been working on reference activities relating to the upcoming 1940 [...]

Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of what President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed  “a date which will live in infamy,” the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Navy.  Thousands of American naval personnel were killed or wounded and U.S. ships and aircraft were sunk or damaged.  As a result of the attack, the U.S. declared war on Japan and entered World War [...]

Researchers are invited to read the minutes of the Researcher Forum meeting on November 18, 2011, posted to the DC-area Researcher Forum web page (http://www.archives.gov/dc-metro/researcher-forum/).  The main feature of the meeting was a presentation/discussion with the audience about the newly completed National Archives facility at St. Louis, an overview of its operations and how the public [...]

Now that we established the difference between Public and Private Land States in my previous post, let’s take a look at the different search paths to locate information about Public Land patents.  The main point to discern is whether you are dealing with an Eastern or Western public land state, because the relevant records are [...]

Imagine that you want to find electronic records related to a particular geographic location in a very large collection (40 TB and about 70 million files) of archival electronic records. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could pick up an iPad, have a map pop up on the screen, run your finger over the area [...]

We’ve listened! Starting November 28, 2011, researchers will no longer be required to record their property data on Equipment Receipts. We will no longer retain equipment receipts for validation of serial numbers by security officers upon your departure from Archives I or Archives II. Security officers will continue to check equipment to validate that your [...]

The following post comes from guest blogger Robyn Dexter, Archivist at the National Archives at Anchorage. Rear Admiral Richard Byrd was born in 1888, part of a prominent Virginia family. His commission in the Navy enabled him to pioneer developments in aviation, learning to fly during WWI. Byrd was instrumental in developing new technologies, such [...]

This week’s blog post comes once again from guest blogger Diane Petro, Archives Technician in the Research Support Branch at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC.  Diane is working on reference activities relating to the upcoming 1940 census release. Researchers often go to the Instructions to the Enumerator when trying to interpret a question [...]