This week is “Sunshine Week,” a week-long celebration of government openness!  Here’s a roundup of activities you might want to do as you celebrate Sunshine Week: Participate in the Open Government Idea Forum on IdeaScale.  Help shape the National Archives’ Open Government Plan.  Your ideas and input matter! Participate in the Managing Government Records discussion [...]

Starting today, we need your ideas, comments, and votes to help us revise the Open Government Plan of the National Archives.  Please visit the Open Government Idea Forum and take a few minutes to let us know what you think we should be doing to strengthen transparency, participation, and collaboration at the National Archives. Two [...]

As part of the recently launched Citizen Archivist Dashboard, you can now participate in the National Archives Transcription Pilot Project.  By contributing to transcriptions, you can make these historical documents more accessible to the public. The transcription pilot features over 300 documents (about 1,000 pages) ranging from the late 18th century through the 20th century.  [...]

Throughout this holiday season, we encourage you to participate in the exciting activities featured on the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, which is available starting today. Check it out and try tagging, transcription, editing articles, uploading digital scans, and participating in contests all related to the records of the National Archives. We hope that you’ll share any suggestions [...]

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 [...]

If you are anything like me, you would love to volunteer more, but you don’t feel you have enough time to make a commitment. Luckily, these days, anyone with a computer and internet access can easily participate in online volunteer projects. An upcoming public program at the National Archives will look at three projects where [...]

Being a journalist in this digital and new media age presents challenges and frustrations of tracking down and accessing Federal, State, and Local government information needed to produce responsible and accurate news products. Read today’s blog for an invitation to a free conference co-sponsored by NARA and Duke University on April 12, focusing on ways that journalists and researchers may better discover, access, and use digital government information.

Last month, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) submitted their report to the President and to Congress, “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology.“ In this report, the PCAST provides recommendations – with specific mention of NARA’s role in Digital Democracy – regarding IT research priorities, challenges, and opportunities for the Federal government in the years ahead.

We’re launching a public wiki pilot project that will allow researchers, historians, archivists, and citizen archivists to create pages on records or themes. We need your ideas and enthusiasm to make the wiki a success.  Please join us for the second planning meeting at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, on Wednesday, May 19th from [...]

We joined Flickr last summer as a new way to share our photos with the public. These photos are also available via our online catalog, the Archival Research Catalog (ARC). From the iconic Mathew Brady Civil War photographs to the stirring images from the Environmental Protection Agency’s DOCUMERICA endeavor in the 1970s, thousands of people [...]