On May 23, 2012, the White House released the Digital Government Strategy, which outlines how all federal agencies will work to make information and services easily accessible on the internet, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. President Barack Obama said, “Ultimately, this Strategy will ensure that agencies use emerging technologies to serve the public as [...]

June 18, 2012–the anniversary of the U.S. declaration of war against Great Britain–marked the official start of the bicentennial of the War of 1812.  To help celebrate that anniversary and bring attention to one of America’s lesser known conflicts, let’s take a look at some of the records of that war, starting with an essential [...]

Today’s post comes from National Archives at Kansas City staff members, Archivist Elizabeth Burnes and Exhibit Specialist Dee Harris. Photograph, Improvement Missouri River in Vicinity of Glasgow, MO, August 1881. RG 77, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Omaha District.  (National Archives at Kansas City) The National Archives at Kansas City welcomed [...]

On Friday, the National Archives released the updated Open Government Plan that will guide our efforts in transparency, participation, and collaboration for 2012-2014. Over the past two years, we’ve implemented most of the 70 tasks we set out to accomplish in our 2010 Open Government Plan, including major initiatives in records management, declassification, and FOIA, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]