This week is “Sunshine Week,” a week-long celebration of government openness!  Here’s a roundup of activities you might want to do as you celebrate Sunshine Week: Participate in the Open Government Idea Forum on IdeaScale.  Help shape the National Archives’ Open Government Plan.  Your ideas and input matter! Participate in the Managing Government Records discussion [...]

This is a guest post by Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. Lori has also served as the Wikipedian in Residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis since 2010 and is currently a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. It’s a well-known fact that Wikipedians love NARA [...]

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. [...]

Today’s post comes from Theresa Fitzgerald and Wanda Williams, archivists at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Come see our new Documented Rights exhibit, which opens today, Monday, October 3, 2011, and runs through March 2, 2012 at the new National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. This special exhibition illustrates this nation’s [...]

Maybe it was Memphis (with apologies to Pam Tillis) Recently in Nashville, Tennessee, the Council of State Archivists and the National Association of Government Records Administrators and Archives came together to share new ideas and renew old acquaintances.  About 175 archivists and records administrators were in attendance.  That’s down from last year both because of [...]

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? [...]

The National Archives will be here to answer all your archival questions on June 9th!  Known as Ask Archivists Day, this worldwide event on Twitter will bring together the people who collect, care for, and research archival records in one space where questions from general research practices to whether a repository has your ancestor’s information [...]

Last week, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) held its Spring meeting in Alexandria, VA (May 5-7, 2011). If you missed the conference, today’s Tech Tuesday post is a summary of two events related to MARAC Session S5, “New Tools to Address Electronic Records Challenges.”

If you are anything like me, you would love to volunteer more, but you don’t feel you have enough time to make a commitment. Luckily, these days, anyone with a computer and internet access can easily participate in online volunteer projects. An upcoming public program at the National Archives will look at three projects where [...]

Are you a genealogy blogger?  Do you have questions for NARA, whether it be about blogging or records?  Then we have the event for you!  This year at the 7th Annual Genealogy Fair, The National Archives will be hosting a meet-up to bring together genealogist bloggers and spark some good conversation about the records you [...]