4.4: Strategic Approach to Digitization

Outline an agency-wide approach to NARA's digitizing activities

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Because the American public expects online access to records, digitization has become a fundamental part of our business. Our archival holdings number more than 10 billion pages of unique documents, many of them handwritten, and include formats such as maps, charts, aerial and still photographs, and motion picture, sound, and video recordings. Efforts to digitize historical documents and make them available to the public online are of paramount importance for NARA but are also a massive, complex, and expensive undertaking. As an extension of NARA's Strategic Plan, the Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007—2016 (http://www.archives.gov/digitization/strategy.html) outlines an agency-wide approach to NARA's digitizing activities. The Strategy for Digitizing establishes high-level basic principles for prioritizing our efforts, as well as processes for feedback. Moving forward, we will continue to implement the Strategy for Digitizing as well as several additional efforts. First, we will convene an agency-level digitization working group to develop strategies on best approaches to streamlining and leveraging current processes. The goal will be to increase access to more digital copies of holdings online. This working group will develop a partnership digitization registry as well as an in-house digitization registry to track all progress being made in this area, with the goal to make these registries available online to the public. The digitization working group will consider the ideas submitted on NARA's Open Government Idea Forum, including: * Make all collections being considered for digitization publicly available for discussion and prioritization. * Specific recommendations for digitization, including Federal land records (Record Group 49). * Make more genealogy records and other family history records available free online. “If I can’t find what I am looking for, there is no best thing.” We received numerous thoughtful suggestions for digitization projects that would harness the work of volunteers, researchers, and the public. Suggestions also cited models such as the National Archives of Australia "scan on demand" project, wherein users are charged for the first scan made for them, to recover scanning costs, and then the digital copy is made available for free to the public online. All suggestions will be explored by the digitization working group. We encourage your feedback on improvements to digitization at the National Archives, including your responses to the following questions: * What specific kinds of information would you like to see on the digitization registries? Would it be helpful to show a representative image of each registry item? * How can we fully utilize volunteers in our digitization work? * What initiatives should the digitization working group consider? Would you be interested in a scan on demand program?

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