Last year, OCLC’s Rachel Frick and Merrilee Proffitt convened a group of experts, practitioners, and community members to discuss reparative and inclusive descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives. Staff from the National Archives participated and were energized by the conversations. Last week, OCLC published a report based on the convening, “Reimagine … Continue reading Learning and Growing with the Library and Archival Community
It’s been a very good week for the 1950 Census! Our goal for the 1950 Census website was to provide a simple, intuitive site as well as bulk download capabilities for users and make it available as soon as we legally could. The National Archives’ Census team stayed up late on the evening of March … Continue reading This Week in the 1950 Census
At midnight, the National Archives launched the 1950 Census website. Staff from across the agency have been working over the past decade to prepare the records and provide them to you. I am very proud of how their work has fulfilled our mission to make access happen. NARA and Amazon Web Services experts working together … Continue reading The 1950 Census is Here!
Numbers never tell the whole story, but they do provide insights that are useful for understanding the scope and impact of our work. Here are some of the numbers we have tracked that indicate how we have grown to make access happen, connect with customers, and maximize our value to the nation from 2010 to … Continue reading By the Numbers: 2010-2022
The clock is ticking down to the April 1, 2022 launch of the 1950 Census and NARA staff have been buzzing with activity in preparation for the date. The Big Count National Archives Identifier 178688266, p. 15 The data for each Census is restricted for 72 years, and the earliest it may be made available … Continue reading Countdown to the 1950 Census!
Over the years, NARA’s GIPHY Channel has been surprisingly popular with the public. We first launched our channel on GIPHY in 2016, not knowing if the public would be interested in this way of sharing our records. We quickly learned that we were on to something when we received nearly 32 million views that year. By … Continue reading Meeting You Where You Are
In 2011, we introduced the tagging feature in the National Archives Catalog as a way to invite citizens to contribute their knowledge and expertise to archival descriptions: the “Wisdom of the Crowd.” Within the first month, we celebrated more than 1,000 user-contributed tags; each added with the goal of enhancing records and helping to improve … Continue reading Catalog Contributions: Celebrating the “Wisdom of the Crowd”
An enumeration district (ED), as used by the Bureau of the Census, was an area that could be covered by a single enumerator (census taker) in one census period. Enumeration districts varied in size from several city blocks in densely populated urban areas to an entire county equivalent in sparsely populated rural areas. During the … Continue reading NARA Staff Collaborate for Improved Access to the 1950 Census
In keeping with the recommendations from my Task Force on Racism, NARA chartered the Reparative Description and Digitization Working Group in July of 2021. Since then, the Working Group has been reviewing guidance, standards, and processes relating to reparative archival description as well as benchmarking the work of peer institutions. Yale University Library notes that reparative … Continue reading Guiding Principles for Reparative Description
Thanks to the persistence and dedication of many NARA staff and the help of our partners, the number of digital copies of our records in the National Archives Catalog surpassed 150 million. Digitizing large quantities of our records is an important goal for NARA because we know that not everyone can come to our facilities … Continue reading Celebrating 150 Million Digital Copies in the Catalog, Part 4: Highlights from the Presidential Libraries
