NARAtions

Digitized and indexed marriage records from the Virginia Field Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau are available online via FamilySearch. FamilySearch digitized the microfilm and, in collaboration with the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, coordinated volunteers who indexed the materials. The Virginia records are part of the pilot phase of the project to digitize all of NARA’s Freedmen’s Bureau papers that have been microfilmed. The next phase of the project will focus on other states’ Freedmen’s Bureau records. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture may ultimately host the digitized records online.

Search the Viriginia Freedmen’s Bureau Marriage records online. The FamilySearch site is free. The pilot records search requires Adobe Flash Player 10 and may take a while to load on some computers.

Sample document: Search result for Mary Lewis

NARA is in the very early phases of designing its next generation online catalog.  Should we allow the public to tag catalog descriptions?  Why or why not?

Our current online catalog, the Archival Research Catalog (ARC), does not allow for tagging.  Staff archivists can add subject terms from our authority list of approved subject headings (based on the Library of Congress Subject Authority Headings), but in many cases there is not enough time to index the descriptions.  People using the catalog would be able to add whatever tags or keywords to the catalog descriptions. 

What do you think?

[Revised: August 14, 2009]

In response to your great suggestions about adding background info on tagging, here are a few resources we thought might be of interest:

A general definition from Wikipedia:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)

A mainly positive review from Newsweek:

• Levy, Steven. “In the New Game of Tag, All of Us Are It.” Newsweek, 18 April 2005/ http://www.newsweek.com/id/49636.

A more conservative assessment in the journal D-Lib Magazine:

• Guy, Marieke, and Emma Tonkin. “Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 1 (2006) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html.

Welcome to NARAtions, a blog about online public access to the records of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).   (Yes, we know the proper spelling of narration contains two r’s, but we couldn’t resist the pun!)

We hope to hear from NARA researchers and anyone interested in the Archives on topics related to online access and historical research in general. The plan is to post questions periodically and encourage you to share your opinions, ideas, and stories with us.  We will also post news items about descriptions or digitized archival materials available online.