NARAtions is a blog about public access to the records of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Like most government agencies, any information released by the National Archives and Records Administration has always been written in the finest government double-speak, passed from committee to committee before being released to the public. In short, I find most announcements from NARA to be nearly unreadable.
The new NARAtions blog is a welcome change: it is actually easy to read.
Quoting from the blog's web site:
We began this blog because we are hoping to talk with you about online public access to the records held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). We care about improving your researcher experience.
NARA has custody of more than 9 billion pages of records. How do we provide online access to it all? It’s a big challenge. Everyone would love to see all of the records available online as high-resolution scans with full-text searchability and a variety of ways to tag, search, browse, and discover the documents, photographs, maps, and films. And how about we get this completed by yesterday?
You can read the blog articles at http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access.
The current question up for comments is: Should we allow the public to tag descriptions in our online catalog? Why or why not?
