DIGITIZING THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

 

NARA Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright, a graduate of the University of Montana, grew up on a ranch outside Conrad. "My job," she explained, "is to find the most efficient and effective ways to share the records of the National Archives with the public online. NARA has been in the business of providing in-person access to the permanent federal records of the U.S. government for decades, and we are pretty good at it." She added, "We are still expanding and improving our digital offerings" — so far, about 300 million of NARA's more than 13 billion records have been scanned and posted to the internet — "but now my family in Montana can easily access census records, military records and many other pertinent records from home."

It makes a weird kind of sense that the government worker who understands the value of providing online advice and information to far-flung Americans, and who is driven to connect the citizens of the hinterlands to their own stories as told in our collective federal records, is a woman whose hometown is a 32-hour drive from a reference desk in D.C.

Every document, map, photograph, recording and film in the National Archives that Wright and her colleagues have scanned and transferred to the internet — accessible from a laptop in Lubbock or a smartphone in Sitka — makes the agency more democratic and more fair, which means the country is, too. One of the Archives' prized possessions refers to this time-consuming drudgery as forming "a more perfect union."

In "the vault" in NARA's neoclassical D.C. headquarters, Wright and I gazed upon the Louisiana Purchase, a striking black volume bedazzled in gold, like a pair of pants worthy of Prince, one of the Louisiana Territory's greatest sons. When Napoleon, strapped for cash, sold control of more than 800,000 square miles to the United States in 1803 — a preposterous, nearly ungovernable stretch of real estate that would encompass the present-day boundaries of France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Switzerland — he cursed us as a people with a perpetual state of alienation (and North Dakota). Conrad is up near the Louisiana Territory's northwestern edge, just east of the Continental Divide. We flipped to the fading signature that bequeathed to Wright a birthplace as well as her life's work shrinking down all that distance: "Bonaparte."

In the NARA vault, we also glanced at the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 — a leg up for future settlers like her Norwegian American grandfather and an irrevocable setback for the continent's original inhabitants. If National Park Service estimates are correct, more than one-fourth of all Americans descend from homesteaders, including both of Montana's U.S. senators, Democrat Jon Tester and Republican Steve Daines.

As NARA's first chief innovation officer, Wright explained, "my role has been to ignite a culture of innovation across the agency, to nurture new ideas and to incorporate emerging technologies in order to better share our records with the public. For example, we worked with Wikipedia to put thousands of digital copies of our records on their website. This resulted in billions of views by people who may never visit the NARA website, let alone one of our buildings."

Roger Burdette adds:

 

To read the complete article, see:
The Equalizer (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/sarah-vowell-national-archives-digitization-records-smartphones/)

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