Researchers are invited to read the minutes of the Researcher Forum meeting on May 18, 2012, posted to the DC-area Researcher Forum web page. The main feature of the meeting was a discussion with NARA’s digitization partners: Sabrina Petersen from Ancestry.com; Aaron Spencer from Fold3 (formerly Footnote.com); and John de Jong from FamilySearch.org. Rebecca Warlow [...]

Join us for our next National Archives Researcher Forum! This forum will be held on Friday, May 18, at 1:00 p.m. in room G-25, the new classroom in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC (Archives I). NARA’s digitization partners will return for continued discussion of the digitization of archival records, begun at the September [...]

In honor of Earth Day, we have added a great new set of photographs from the Documerica collection to Flickr.  Boyd Norton, a photographer who is still greatly involved with nature photography, took photos of the National Parks in the southwest, and documented solar energy projects in Arizona and strip mining in Montana as a [...]

We hope that you will be able to join us for the next meeting of the National Archives Researcher Forum.  It will be held on Friday, May 18, at 1:00 p.m. in G-25, the new classroom in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC (Archives I).  NARA’s digitization partners will return for continued discussion of [...]

Phillip Dick’s 1974 novel with this title is one of best treatments of the blurring line between man and machine. You may know it from the film based on the novel, Blade Runner. When machines are indistinguishable from humans, Dick asks, what does it mean to be a machine or a human. I have always [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]