American Library Association - Campaigns - A.L.A. Campaign for Books. Front of Public Library, N.Y. City, N.Y. National Archives Identifier 17342827
We are excited to introduce this fully redesigned and modernized online public access Catalog. Our new Catalog maximizes our ability to make the records of the National Archives even more accessible. Discover what's new!
For our Citizen Archivists, user accounts and contribution functions are now available! One of the biggest updates to the new Catalog is a change in how you access your National Archives Catalog user account. With our new Catalog, all user accounts and existing contributions have been migrated to Login.gov. More information about Login.gov accounts is available in our Login.gov Help Center.
Looking for Citizen Archivist Missions? Our topical missions, featured records, and resources are still available in the exact same place: Citizen Archivist Missions
Need step by step instructions? Our tutorials, updated for the new Catalog, can also still be found in our Resources section on our Citizen Archivist Dashboard.
As you contribute to the Catalog, you can find a “Need Help?” link that brings you to the Resources page from the contribution window.
Catalog Help is always available too, linked at the top of every page just like in the legacy Catalog. The information found on this page will help you learn how to search the new Catalog.
Contribution enhancements
Wondering what’s new for Citizen Archivists? Here are a few contribution enhancements you can expect from the new Catalog:
Transcription Autosave - no more worrying about losing your work if you lose your connection. Your work is saved often, automatically.
Longer time for inactivity before a time out - If you start a transcription and have to walk away, you now have 60 minutes of inactivity before your page is released. Additionally, because of our new autosave feature, you won't lose any work if you've forgotten to click save.
Easily view contribution status - More options are now available to display the contribution status for each page. Digital objects and thumbnails now show the transcription status, as well as the number of tags and comments available for that page. More details can be found in the Get Started Transcribing Tutorial on our Resources page.
Have questions about the new Catalog? Find your answer on History Hub! Use the Citizen Archivist community to ask—or answer—questions, or see if your question has already been answered.
As excited as we are about our new Catalog, launching an entirely new system is a challenging, big task!
You may have noticed some bugs while searching in our new Catalog and contributing as a Citizen Archivist. Some of these bugs include problems with advanced search and filtering of search results, page jumping while navigating through records, and problems with image display.
We are going to fix these key bugs and issues, and we have a team committed to developing and delivering bug fixes and key features on a rolling basis in the coming weeks and months. These fixes will result in a smoother process for contributions, more consistent search results, as well as fixes for images not displaying properly.
In the meantime, the legacy Catalog will still be available until March, so that both systems are available in parallel. Searches in the new Catalog that need to be fixed can still be performed in the legacy Catalog. Please bear with us while we work to fix and respond to issues. We will get this right.
Specifically for our Citizen Archivists, we are aware of several bugs in the transcription module, including a lag from when you type to how fast it appears on the screen, as well as a problem initiating the transcribe button on some records. We're also looking into options to adjust the size of the transcription panel based on your feedback.
While we work to address these transcription problems, we encourage you to get familiar with our new layout and try one of our tagging missions! We have two tagging missions currently available on our Citizen Archivist dashboard: FDR Library Public Domain Photographs, and West Point Military Academy.
We’re looking for your help to add keywords and details as tags to these photographs to help make them more searchable in our Catalog. Want to learn more about tagging? Check out our “What Makes a Good Tag?” tutorial.
