Category Archives: oa.usa.nara

Citizen Archivist Contributions Push Catalog Enhancements Past 2 Million | National Archives

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“The National Archives Catalog recently surpassed two million pages of records enhanced with tags, transcriptions, and comments, thanks to the record-breaking efforts of citizen archivists, as well as agency employees working from home.

This was the second major milestone in a year for the Citizen Archivist project, which began in 2014. Enhancements reached one million on August 10, 2020, and two million on June 1, 2021.

“After pursuing and achieving the goal of enhancing one million records over several years, we were stunned to surpass the two million records enhanced mark in only 10 months,” said Pamela Wright, the agency’s Chief Innovation Officer. “Citizen archivists and NARA staff have been working hard to make the public’s records more accessible to users, and achieving this milestone so quickly is a testament to their dedication.”

Citizen Archivists contribute to records by tagging them, making comments, or transcribing documents to make searching easier and allow more members of the public to find documents relevant to their research. (Read more about how keywords help researchers in the NARAtions blog.) The Citizen Archivist team prepares “missions” for contributors to work on, focusing the momentum on particular groups of records at one time….”

National Archives Wants to Use AI to Improve ‘Unsophisticated Search’ and Create ‘Self-Describing Records’ – Nextgov

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“The archive’s catalog currently holds more than 120 million digital records, as well as “archival metadata and other types of records, including electronic databases.” However, the system has “an unsophisticated search” function, according to a request for information.

While NARA employees add metadata tags to digital records, “There is a delta between what NARA has been able to describe and the specific information that users want from our records,” the RFI states, asking, “Can AI fill the gap?”

During an informational day held in early April, NARA executives outlined some of the challenge, including a single search returning a flood of results from the same source—making it difficult to sift through to find multiple sources—and difficulty distinguishing between records with similar names, such as a search for “Truman” the president versus “Truman” the aircraft carrier.

The current search function also is not able to return accurate results if the search term input is not exactly the same as it exists in the metadata.

The RFI is seeking feedback on automated solutions that can analyze how users search the digital archives and associate those search terms with the appropriate record….”

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) 2021 Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) Information Day

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“The [National Archives] Catalog currently has a large data set (over 100 million digital pages of records, plus archival metadata and other types of records, including electronic databases) and an unsophisticated search. The archival hierarchy of the records is intended to assist the user in discovery, but in the digital realm, users find it difficult to use. The metadata that we have entered manually cannot provide the granular information for users to get the search results they want and it has taken NARA decades to produce. There is a delta between what NARA  has been able to describe, and the specific information that users want from our records. Can AI fill the gap?…”

How NARA’s Preserving More Than 20 Terabytes of Trump Social Media Data – Nextgov

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“America’s federal records-keeper is in the midst of a hefty, ongoing effort to preserve many terabytes of digital and social media records from former President Donald Trump, who was suspended from using multiple online platforms in his final days in office.

To do so, the National Archives and Records Administration is leveraging a technology-based solution called ArchiveSocial.

“NARA has begun the task of working with ArchiveSocial to export the records from their platform and ingest them into NARA’s Electronic Records Archive for preservation,” a statement National Archives Public and Media Communications shared with Nextgov this week said. “We will also prepare exports from ArchiveSocial for public access, and they will be posted on trumplibrary.gov as they are made available.”…”