The Information Professional

"Pamela Wright, chief digital access strategist, describes how the public is helping the National Archives bring its content to the Internet via social media.

 

Wright and the National Archives staff took the lessons they learned from those pilot programs and developed new initiatives around social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. This led to the development of the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, which enlists members of the public who are interested in working with the National Archives to tag records in its online catalog or transcribe handwritten documents so they're easier to find online.

 

"What's great about social media tools is that they help government to really interact with the public in such a way that government becomes of, by and for the people," Wright said. "This is the first time that I've really felt that we have been able to work really directly with people online with a very low barrier to working with us."