At the National Archives, you never know who will come in to do some research.  A few weeks ago, the Still Pictures and Motion Pictures research rooms hosted about 30 Vietnam Veterans who were interested in researching the records of the Department of Army Special Photography Office- or DASPO for short.  The best part about [...]

The National Archives just joined iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store giving users public access to thousands of free lectures, videos, books and podcasts from learning institutions all over the world.  If you already have iTunes on your iPhone, iPad, iPod, or computer, you can search for “National Archives” on iTunes U to [...]

Presenters at the Researcher Forum meeting on August 18 responded to several questions about the Archives I Reconfiguration Project during the Q & A portion of the program, which they promised to look into further and supplement as follows.  Availability of Print and Online Versions of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set NARA purchased the Digital [...]

Founded in 1936, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. During the week of August 22, almost 1,800 archives professionals from all over the globe gathered in Chicago, Illinois for SAA’s annual meeting and anniversary celebration. Today’s blog features my introductory remarks for SAA session #701 that I chaired, “New Perspectives for the 1940 Census” providing a quick history of innovative technologies used for processing and accessing census data.

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 more we interact with the public, whether at national conferences or NARA-sponsored events such at the annual Genealogy Fair, the more we hear how much researchers would like to see our finding aids available online.  Well, this seems like a good opportunity to point out that two of our most popular genealogy Reference Information [...]

A few weeks ago on The Text Message, I introduced Wikimedia’s Wikisource project to you. A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikisource is a free repository of primary-source texts which are transcribed, proofread, and arranged—like Wikipedia—collaboratively by a community of online volunteers. It is my pleasure to announce that, since August 15, Wikimedia’s presence now extends [...]

At the NAGARA plenary address in Nashville a few weeks ago, I was asked to talk about NARA’s new Applied Research Division, which wandered into an explanation about why we haven’t been ERA Research for the past two years. Folks were encouraged to attend my 1940 Census session, featuring NARA research partners who are using cool smart tools to make sense out of scanned images—there was not an empty chair in the room, leading to fruitful discussions and promising collaborations…and that’s what you missed at NAGARA! Read the full story here…

As a way to tie together all the Confederate prisoner of war records that we’ve discussed over the last several weeks, I thought you might want to know about a specific record the War Department compiled in the early 20th century to document all of the Confederate POWs who died in Federal custody during the [...]

We asked our new Wikipedian in Residence, Dominic McDevitt-Parks, to tell us a little bit about himself and his passion for Wikipedia.  Welcome to the National Archives, Dominic! Tell us a little about yourself.  Where are you from?  What do you study in school? I am a history buff, a word nerd, a news junkie, [...]