Go Dominic and Wikimedians! Though obviously we are not so scalable. What next?

Katie

Begin forwarded message:

From: The White House info@messages.whitehouse.gov Date: January 20, 2012 6:27:44 PM EST To: filbertk@gmail.com Subject: Petition Response: Digitizing Federal Public Records Reply-To: The White House info@messages.whitehouse.gov

Digitizing Federal Public Records By David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States

Thank you for signing a petition asking the Obama Administration to digitize all public records.

The Obama Administration believes increasing access to our collections by digitizing our records is a great idea. Our most recent efforts to do this ourselves as part of our OpenGov initiative, include the Citizen Archivist project, a Wikipedian in Residence, Tag it Tuesdays, and Scanathons. We are also moving forward on implementing the President’s recent Memorandum on Managin g Government Records, which focuses on the need to update policies a nd practices for the digital age.

But all those things aren’t enough. Your petition, and the Yes We Sc an effort broadly, calls for a national strategy, and even a Federal Scanning Commission, to figure out what it would take to digitize t he holdings of many federal entities, from the Library of Congress t o the Government Printing Office to the Smithsonian Institution.

These ideas bring up a host of questions that still need to be answered: What should the National Archives’ priorities be? Do we fo cus on preserving deteriorating paper records, still bound with red ribbons from two centuries ago? Do we make digital copies of Vietnam Era film footage? Should we focus on preserving those older paper r ecords while citizens volunteer to digitize more recent, and better preserved, records?

The National Archives – which houses the Nation’s permanent records – is looking for your input to help answer these important q uestions on how we move forward. What are your thoughts on how the N ational Archives and other agencies should proceed? What questions s hould we be asking ourselves?

You can add your thoughts over on the National Archives blog, and I’ m looking forward to having a longer discussion with the creators an d signers of this petition on this important issue in the coming wee ks– more details on that will follow.

Thank you again for your interest in this important issue. I’m looki ng forward to your ideas on how we can proceed with digitizing feder al public records.

Check out this response on We the People.

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