Archives Update: 300,000 pages and Counting

As the year 2013 comes to a close, we at the U.S. National Archives (NARA) are pleased to announce that we have just finished imaging 300,000 pages of historic Navy deck logs and logs of the U.S. Revenue Cutter and Coast Guard vessels since the start of the NARA/NOAA collaboration in the summer of 2012. Thus we have surpassed our initial pilot project objective to digitize an estimated 250,000 logbook pages of U.S. vessels that sailed the Alaska-Arctic region. The collaborative effort among NOAA, NARA, and Old Weather was prominently featured in the September, 2013 issue of the Discover magazine.

We are a crew of three here at the Archives. At the helm is Mark Mollan, Navy/Maritime Reference Archivist, who is expertly guiding us through a sea of logbooks in various conditions and formats. Gina Kim Perry, who came onboard six months ago, is manning the station at the Digital Imaging Center at Archives 1 in Washington, DC. Our newest member is Helen MacDiarmid, who recently joined us to work at the imaging station at Archives 2 in College Park, Maryland.

Our overarching goal is to provide the best possible images for use by citizen scientist transcribers at the Old Weather project and for the general public at the NARA website. To that end, we have improved our workflow, and with expected equipment upgrades in the coming year, we hope to become even more efficient. In addition, with the start of the new year, Gina and Helen look forward to spending some of their time on outreach and education activities, with their initial focus on getting more people involved as citizen scientist transcribers for Old Weather.

If any citizen scientists will be visiting the Washington, DC, area, please look us up. We would love to meet you.

Until next time,
Gina at Archives 1