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National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility

(www.archives.gov)
299 points LastTrain | 4 comments | 24 Jun 25 21:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.22s | source
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Molitor5901 ◴[24 Jun 25 23:11 UTC] No.44372063[source]▶
I have a researcher card, it's not an arduous process. The staff are very kind. When you show up to the National Archives in Washington, DC., prepare to encounter a general group of 2 dozen pros carrying scanners, laptops, etc. It's quite the experience.

I don't see this is that big of a deal. It's open, you can access it, but they are controlling more. Given the propensity for the theft and destruction of archives documents in the past, I'm ok with more security.

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1. londons_explore ◴[24 Jun 25 23:31 UTC] No.44372186[source]▶
I want more lockdown of the original documents (put them in a cave somewhere), but more openness of digital scans.

Please just make a huge torrent and let everyone take a look.

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2. thadt ◴[24 Jun 25 23:41 UTC] No.44372246[source]▶
There are a significant number of digital scans available online. The problem is that they're only a tip of the iceberg of the available material, and digitizing records costs time and money (that apparently they don't have much of right now).
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3. cvoss ◴[25 Jun 25 04:30 UTC] No.44373623[source]▶
Indeed, the archive has cavernous branches, in the literal sense you desire.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/spring/h...

4. londons_explore ◴[25 Jun 25 10:09 UTC] No.44375515[source]▶
The smart move is to downsize the reading rooms and use the money for a high speed scanning team.

The scanning should focus on volume not accuracy or quality. If anyone needed that sort of thing, they could always go back to the original documents.

So many digitisation projects spend half their time perfecting metadata etc - which IMO is of far lower value than just getting the paper scanned and sorting the rest later.