Update: The Archivist's Blog

On April 7, 2010, I wrote about a new blog created by the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero. He is the head of the National Archives and Records Administration. He seems very interested in finding new and better ways of serving the agency's users. Have you read his articles? Good stuff!

Unlike blogs supposedly written by a lot of other bureaucrats, this one is not full of puffed up press releases. David Ferriero apparently writes these articles himself and they seem to be full of interesting ideas and comments.

For instance, a recent article in his blog on "The Future is in the Palm of our Hands," Ferriero predicts that "Mobile will be bigger than desktop Internet in five years." He then writes:

I’m challenging my staff to think about where the puck is going.  I’ve asked my staff to explore:

• Mobile apps - I want our information and records to be available in the palm of your hand.  What apps would you like to see?
• Apps for Archives - A competition for developers to innovate with our datasets on Data.gov and elsewhere.  One possible mashup could be Archival Research Catalog (ARC) descriptions and public tags and comments on Flickr.
• Archives Wiki - A platform for researchers, historians, archivists, and citizen archivists to create pages on records or themes.
• Making Wi-Fi available in our facilities - This is essential for us to move in the direction of mobile Internet.  I know that researchers have been asking for this for a long time, and it’s about time we make it happen.
• A social networking application for staff - A Facebook-like tool that will help us do our jobs in a collaborative way.

These are not side projects.  These are important ways of accomplishing our mission.

I like what this guy writes. He is not your typical dyed-in-the-wool Washington bureaucrat.

You can read David Ferriero's blog at http://blogs.archives.gov/aotus/

I'd suggest you add it to your RSS newsreader. If you don't have an RSS newsreader, get one.