Today’s post comes from Michael Horsley, a Digital Imaging Specialist with the Digitization Services Team. During a long day of scanning glass plate negatives in the Digital Image lab a fleeting image with an intriguing caption caught my eye during a quality control inspection session. As hundreds of images depicting various scenes of the Brooklyn [...]

Today’s post comes from Stephanie Greenhut, Education Technology Specialist, in the Education and Public Programs division. March is Women’s History Month! To celebrate, we’ve created four new collections focusing on women of the past in the National Archives’ profile on Historypin. We began partnering with Historypin back in November, and have since been pinning historic [...]

Most archivists, librarians, and digital preservation folks love metadata — and we at the Archives are no exception.  Metadata is the sort of invisible information stored within or alongside a digital copy of something like a cool, older video about a NASA space flight.  Metadata allows us to keep track of things in a detailed way.  It [...]

Starting today, we need your ideas, comments, and votes to help us revise the Open Government Plan of the National Archives.  Please visit the Open Government Idea Forum and take a few minutes to let us know what you think we should be doing to strengthen transparency, participation, and collaboration at the National Archives. Two [...]

The 1940 Census is almost here!  When it opens on April 2nd at 9:00 AM (Eastern), the place to be is the National Archives’ 1940 Census web site.  We are excited to announce that our home on the web will be:  1940Census.archives.gov We invite you to visit today to watch the video featuring National Archives’ [...]

ARCHIVES I and ARCHIVES II research rooms will shortly be getting new self-service digital scanner/copiers and a new copy card system. What kind of scanner/copiers have been purchased?  The scanner/copiers are the Sharp Model MX-M363, modified to use platen covers in place of document feeders, which are not permitted in copying original records.  The paper [...]

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. [...]

January is traditionally a time of new beginnings. With the turning of the calendar page to a new year comes an opportunity to start fresh with a clean slate.  In Digitization Services (IDS), we have some ideas for where to focus our renewed energy – moving our quality efforts from a project into a program. [...]

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 [...]

Today’s guest blog post comes from Rebecca Crawford of Research Services On October 25, twelve new scanning stations were installed in the Microfilm Research Room in Washington, DC. Since then many of our researchers have used the equipment; we have heard many positive reviews. If you have not used the equipment or you are interested [...]