Your Experience Matters

The National Archives (NARA) provides a broad range of services to internal and external customers, including researchers, visitors, educators, genealogists, students, veterans, information technologists, federal agencies and more.  Research Room at the National Archives in Washington, DC Our records are critical to the American public, but our work to preserve and provide access to the … Continue reading Your Experience Matters

News You Can Use: Subscribe to the National Archives Catalog Newsletter

Communicating with our customers is key to achieving the mission and goals of the National Archives. In fact, as part of the National Archives Strategic Plan, 2018-2022, NARA established a strategic goal to Connect with Customers along with the specific objective of having one million records enhanced by citizen contributions to the National Archives Catalog. … Continue reading News You Can Use: Subscribe to the National Archives Catalog Newsletter

Maximizing NARA’s Value to the Nation: Wide Scale Use of NARA’s Data

The National Archives Strategic Plan for FY 2018-2022 contains a goal to “Maximize NARA’s Value to the Nation.” One of the performance measures of this goal is to collaborate with external platforms and organizations to use NARA’s digitized holdings, or data sets, from the Catalog as a primary source. In fulfilling our mission to drive … Continue reading Maximizing NARA’s Value to the Nation: Wide Scale Use of NARA’s Data

Welcome to the New ClintonLibrary.Gov!

The National Archives’ Presidential Libraries and Museums preserve and provide access to the records of 14 presidential administrations. In support of this mission, we developed an ongoing program to modernize the technologies and designs that support the user experience of our Presidential Library websites. Through this program, we have updated the websites of the Hoover, … Continue reading Welcome to the New ClintonLibrary.Gov!

Democratizing Access to our Records

The National Archives has a big, hairy audacious strategic goal to provide public access to 500 million digital copies of our records through our online Catalog by FY24. When we first announced this goal in 2010, we had less than a million digital copies in the Catalog and getting to 500 million sounded to some … Continue reading Democratizing Access to our Records

Making Access Happen in the Digital Era

This is a story about valuing the hard work that has come before us and thinking innovatively about how we can share that hard work in new ways, using new and emerging digital platforms.  Back in 2006, we launched a short feature on our website, which we called Today’s Document. We featured a particular document … Continue reading Making Access Happen in the Digital Era

Bold Updates to Our Strategic Plan

The new administration has required agencies to create strategic plans covering 2018-2022. Our updated Strategic Plan was circulated for public comment over the past couple of months. We asked for input and you gave it.  You can see the history of comments on our GitHub page.  With updates informed by those comments, we provided OMB … Continue reading Bold Updates to Our Strategic Plan

Launch and Learn: Our New History Hub Pilot Project

I am pleased to announce a new pilot project from the Office of Innovation at the National Archives called the “History Hub.” This new platform may be thought of as an external collaboration network, a place where subject matter experts from the National Archives can engage with researchers and the public, to share information, work … Continue reading Launch and Learn: Our New History Hub Pilot Project

Be Bold. Build Our Future Through Our People

Our fourth strategic goal, our most important goal, focuses on the real treasures of the National Archives--our staff. Photograph of Female Statue, The Future, Located near the Pennsylvania Avenue Entrance to the National Archives Building, 06/30/1936. National Archives ID: 7657960   This goal highlights our commitment to provide our staff with the training, tools and opportunities necessary … Continue reading Be Bold. Build Our Future Through Our People

Be Bold: Maximize NARA’s Value to the Nation

In this goal we recognize that public access to government information creates measurable economic value, which adds to the enduring cultural, historical, and evidentiary value of our records. National Archives Identifier: 196401 When we talk about economic value, we are not talking about the appraised value or the replacement value of our records. Historically, we … Continue reading Be Bold: Maximize NARA’s Value to the Nation