The minutes from the meeting on November 19th are posted below. The minutes will be posted on the web after the new redesign of Archives.gov is launched next week. Handouts Agenda The Text Message — The Blog of the Textual Archives Services Division at Archives II I. Welcome Director, Access Programs Susan Cummings welcomed everyone [...]

Do you like photographs of past places and times?  Do you like to take photographs yourself?  Have you ever wanted your work to be featured and sold by the National Archives?  Then we have the contest for you! The National Archives introduces our first photo contest on Challenge.gov, an innovative website where the Federal government [...]

Genealogists, you love census records. I would easily nominate you as their No. 1 fan! Census records are rock stars for those who love to research family history. Have you ever wondered what it will be like to research the 2010 Census records in the future? The decisions about what is permanently kept are being [...]

We posted the first version of our social media strategy today on Archives.gov. Our overall approach is to engage our staff, the government community, and researchers and citizen archivists so we can be a more open agency while accomplish NARA’s mission more effectively. We express our core values and strategies for social media in three [...]

Ever wonder what exciting new projects the many employees at NARA are working on? The “What are You Working On?” blog feature aims to introduce a variety of NARA employees and highlight some of the exciting projects we are working on around the agency. Check for this blog series on Wednesdays! This week, we introduce [...]

Yesterday, The National Archives (TNA) of the United Kingdom and NARA issued simultaneious press releases about the development and release of a significantly expanded PRONOM registry, which supports digital preservation. The announcement highlights the successful partnership between TNA and NARA’s Center for Advanced Systems and Technologies (NCAST) research partners, at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Army Research Lab.

The following post is by guest blogger Corey Stewart of the Archival Programs Division at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.  Thanks Corey! Photograph, Capt. Henry T. Elrod, February 1, 1940 Just hours after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched an attack on Wake Island, December 8, 1941.  The initial enemy bombing runs [...]

We are just finishing up performance appraisals at NARA – that annual event where employees and supervisors get together and discuss how the employee has done in the past year to meet his or her “critical elements.”   Critical elements are the duties and responsibilities each one of us has to support NARA’s goals and objectives. [...]

Last time I talked about the records of appointment of postmasters. This time, I want to talk about a different type of post office record – one that doesn’t provide a lot of family history information, but can provide a great deal of information about the community. Reports of Site Locations provide, as the series [...]

Continuing the theme of my last post, which introduced alternate ways to research 20th century military service (to compensate for the personnel files lost in the 1973 file at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis), this time we’ll look at two essential series of unit records relating to World War II. By far [...]