Several minutes ago, I received a Press Release from the U.S. National Archives. It has launched a brand new digitization center at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) location in College Park, Maryland. If I mentioned this to most people, the reaction would not even come close to what most of my readers will feel!
“The new center’s equipment fleet includes high-speed scanners and overhead camera systems that can handle a variety of record types and formats. Thanks to this equipment, the National Archives will be able to digitize up to 10 times as many records per year. This will provide Americans with access to millions of additional records each year. With more than 13 billion paper records in its holdings, being able to speed up digitization is critical to the agency’s mission of providing access to federal records.”
I am excited because every time I check the NARA Catalog for some specific items, I keep coming up against a “NOT YET AVAILABLE ONLINE” or that a collection is only partially digitized on the NARA website. I can find some of the material digitized on NARA partner websites (Ancestry, FamilySearch, etc.) but there still millions of pages of textual records to be digitized. Then there are the photos, maps, etc. . .
Many additional details can be found in the full Press Release. https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2024
© 2024, Paula Stuart-Warren. All rights reserved.
I wish NARA would prioritize digitizing Civil War pension files. I appreciate what a huge task that would be. But, I’ve used the paper pension files at NARA 1 in D.C., and so many of them are fragile and falling apart.