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 [...]

Have you ever looked at an historic storefront flanked by modern office buildings and wondered what the streetscape might have looked like back when that first building was constructed? If so, the National Archives’ new partnership with Historypin may be right up your alley! Historypin, a project of the British non-profit We Are What We [...]

We’re just over halfway through this summer’s “I Found it in the National Archives” contest and have enjoyed reading the stories that have come in so far! From Rebecca Lawrence-Weden’s tale of a lighthouse, a walnut and the Great War to Wendy Griswold’s experience shedding some light on a 106-year-old family tragedy, the determination and [...]

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? [...]

Have you ever landed on a Wikipedia page containing just the beginnings of an article, waiting to be filled in with valuable content? In Wikipedia parlance, these are stubs; skeleton pages set up with the basic outline of a topic which subject matter experts can work together to build into full encyclopedia articles. We see [...]

Ever been to a birthday party for an encyclopedia? No? Well, here’s your chance. Wikipedia turns 10 tomorrow, and there will be celebrations worldwide over the next two weeks. On Saturday, January 22nd, 2011, it’s our turn to get in on the fun. The National Archives will be hosting a 10th anniversary meetup for friends [...]

Good news for DC-area NARA users- as of today, wireless internet is available to registered researchers at A1 and A2! This means that researchers with laptops and other WiFi-enabled devices will be able to access the online catalog, Ancestry.com, Footnote.com and other great sites via the free wireless connection in public areas of the Archives [...]

A new participation opportunity is available to you as part of the Archives.gov redesign activities – vote on the Archives.gov homepage designs! The four design candidates will be on display July 6-9 in the National Archives Research Rooms in College Park, MD, and Washington, DC. Learn More here. We’ve set up two ways for you [...]

As the Archives.gov website redesign preparation continues, we’re looking for your input on how to refer to NARA’s vast collection of records. What would you collectively call all of the documents, photos, and videos that the National Archives stores? For example, would you call them holdings, collections, our catalog, an inventory, records, or something else? [...]