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 [...]

Back in November, the National Archives, with the help of the Environmental Protection Agency, launched a new contest that asked students to create something inspired by one of our Documerica photos.  This contest, Document Your Environment, brought in so many creative interpretations of the original 1970s photos!  From videos to paintings and Photoshop creations to [...]

Imagine that you want to find electronic records related to a particular geographic location in a very large collection (40 TB and about 70 million files) of archival electronic records. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could pick up an iPad, have a map pop up on the screen, run your finger over the area [...]

Students, do you ever look at the environment around you, and wonder about what it used to look like or what it will look like in the next few decades?  Are you interested in doing something constructive to help raise awareness for environmental issues?  Then we have the perfect contest for you!  The National Archives [...]

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 [...]

This Sunday will mark the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  As we remember the events of that day, the George W. Bush Presidential Library has posted more than 150 photos from their collection on Flickr.  The photos from September and October 2001 offer a glimpse into the world of President Bush [...]

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 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 [...]

The National Archives will be here to answer all your archival questions on June 9th!  Known as Ask Archivists Day, this worldwide event on Twitter will bring together the people who collect, care for, and research archival records in one space where questions from general research practices to whether a repository has your ancestor’s information [...]