David Ferriero’s recent post over on the AOTUS blog made mention of NARA’s Wikipedia ExtravaSCANza in the context of a discussion of the “Yes We Scan” initiative and a broader digitization strategy. I want to take the opportunity to recap the citizen archivist scanning the National Archives has been hosting for Wikipedians in recent months. [...]

As part of the recently launched Citizen Archivist Dashboard, you can now participate in the National Archives Transcription Pilot Project.  By contributing to transcriptions, you can make these historical documents more accessible to the public. The transcription pilot features over 300 documents (about 1,000 pages) ranging from the late 18th century through the 20th century.  [...]

Throughout this holiday season, we encourage you to participate in the exciting activities featured on the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, which is available starting today. Check it out and try tagging, transcription, editing articles, uploading digital scans, and participating in contests all related to the records of the National Archives. We hope that you’ll share any suggestions [...]

We hope that you will be able to join us for the next meeting of the Researcher Forum on Friday, January 27, 2012, at 1:00 p.m. in Room G-24 at Archives I in Washington, DC.  Archivist David Ferriero will join us for a discussion of NARA’s Citizen Archivist program. A special feature of the program [...]

Friday marks the annual observance of Veterans Day, a day on which we honor the millions of brave men and women who have served in the Armed Forces.  This Tag It Tuesday, in tribute to our military veterans, we’re asking you to tag records in the Online Public Access (OPA) that relate to veterans and the military.   [...]

On this day 141 years ago, the forerunner of today’s National Weather Service – the Signal Service Corps’ Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce – made its first meteorological observations and reports and the weather hasn’t been the same since. “Weather” you like singing in the rain, chasing storms, or checking the daily [...]

We’re excited to kick off Tag It Tuesday! In this new weekly feature we’ll be highlighting content from our online catalog that we invite you to tag. Curious about what tagging means and how you can get involved? Check out our previous blog post, in which we introduced the Online Public Access catalog’s new feature [...]

As part of our open government initiatives, the National Archives has begun to share applications developed in-house on GitHub, a social coding platform.  GitHub is a service used by software developers to share and collaborate on software development projects and many open source development projects. Over the last year and a half, our Digitization Services [...]

The following is a guest post by Kate Murray, Digitization Process Development Specialist at the National Archives.   Recently I had what I can only describe as a Eureka moment. I was attending an informal presentation by Hans Westerhoff describing the Images for the Future project in the Netherlands. He said one of the most [...]

The following post comes from Stuart Culy of the Policy and Planning Staff We want your comments, again! Last December, the National Archives started looking at changing the way we let the public know about new and changing record reproduction fees.  As a result of public comments and staff deliberations, we’ve drafted a proposed rule [...]