This week is International Archives Week, time set aside by the International Council on Archives (ICA) to celebrate the founding of ICA in 1948. This year, the theme for the 2019 ICA Conference in Adelaide, Australia, is “Designing the Archives in the 21st Century.”
Our archivists have been designing the archive—in the sense of shaping the archival collection we want to provide—based on our understanding of what our researchers need and what Federal agencies can provide.
The National Archives of the future will still have our keystone documents—the original Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights—for the public to see.
However, now we are also planning for voluminous new series full of personal information most valued by genealogists and a shift in collecting focus toward searchable digital records for the many researchers who rely on modern records and who prefer the searchability and remote access that electronic and digitized records provide. We are listening to our users’ needs and honing our user experience skills as we design our archives for the 21st century.
Learn more on the Prologue blog.