Archivist of the United States Makes Citizens National Treasure Hunters

Archivist of the United States Makes Citizens National Treasure Hunters

Question: How can we improve Citizen Archiving in Second Life?

Original Webstream: http://www.sil.si.edu/lectures_ferriero_20100526.html
Archived Webstreams: http://www.sil.si.edu/digitallibrary_browse.cfm?category=webcasts

(Washington DC) 10:30 AM EST today - David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States discussed social media at the Smithsonian in a live broadcast via UStream in a talk called “Democracy 2.0: A Case Study in Open Government: How the National Archives' own Open Government Plan is reaching out to new audiences through social media.” During his talk Ferriero discussed his new blog, AOTUS: Collector in Chief: http://blogs.archives.gov/aotus/. One of the articles in his blog is about launching a new, controversial project called "Citizen Archivists," where the public users can participate in managing government data and archives. He detailed the case study of where a "Citizen Archivist Discovers National Treasure in the Stacks" http://bit.ly/d2X4vk. For those who have seen the movie, National Treasure, in Ben Gates-style, citizens can now be more engaged in the use and application of our nation’s archival documents and data sets.

More and more, government documents are “born digital” that is, they are created in digital format and may not be available as paper documents, paper-based photographs, or other 3D formats. Ferriero joked that when he was at MIT, he (like most other archivists in the U.S.) were waiting to see how to handle the archiving of electronic records issue by waiting to see what the ERA would do. Now that he is the AOTUS, laughed, he no longer has that luxury.

In terms of faster, more efficient declassification of government documents, Ferriero said that the new Director from the CIA will be using their computer declassification system to make the declassification process simpler. The major change will be that classification of new documents will be Classified solely based on national security issues.

Another major breakthrough, Ferriero said, was that previously certain areas of the government dealing with records did not work closely enough with each other. To facilitate better collaboration between government agencies, Ferriero stated he called for a meeting with CIO Council (Vivek Kundra) and the Records Management Council.

In terms of archiving of documents, email, and social media entries by government employees, Ferriero referenced the archiving of both official and personal documents, as well as the archiving of Twitter and Facebook entries.

For more information on these and related issues, like open government and data.gov, check out the following Twitter tags: #vgov, #LAMfutures, #g2e, #Ferriero. Learn about the new White House program to use government datasets: “Data.gov is leading the way in democratizing public sector data and driving innovation. The data is being surfaced from many locations making the Government data stores available to researchers to perform their own analysis. Developers are finding good uses for the datasets, providing interesting and useful applications that allow for new views and public analysis” http://www.data.gov/. VGOV (http://www.ocio.usda.gov/vgov/index.html) is a federal government virtual world project. The purpose of which is to “provide a secure virtual world environment” and includes the USDA, USAF, Dept. of Homeland Security, National Defense University, and the US Dept. of State.