"Yes We Scan"

In September 2011, the White House launched an online petition web site, We the People, where anyone can post an idea asking the Obama administration to take action on a range of issues, get signatures, and get a response from their government.

It's an experiment in democracy, which is generating new ideas and improving on old ideas every day. One of those rising ideas is "Yes We Scan."

Yes We Scan is an effort by the Center for American Progress and Public.Resource.org to promote digitization of all government information in an effort to make it more accessible to the world.

Here at the National Archives, we house the nation's permanent records, and we think increasing access to our collections in this way 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 Managing Government Records, which focuses on the need to update policies and practices for the digital age.

Wikipedia "ExtravaSCANza" at the National Archives in College Park, MD.  January… [ Read all ]