The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has announced the opening of its new mass digitalization center in College Park, Md., which it said will help speed up the digitalization of important government documents like never before.
The new center is equipped with some of the latest high-speed scanners and overhead cameras to digitize records at a pace ten times the previous mark.
“With new high-speed scanners and a dedicated team of digitization staff, this new Center is a game changer for the National Archives,” said Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan in announcing the new center on April 12. “It provides us a ten-fold increase in our in-house scanning capacity and will help us make millions of original records accessible online for Americans everywhere,” she said.
The new 18,000-square-foot center was completed late last year, its opening marks the first phase of a multiyear renovation project by NARA to support the mass digitalization of enormous volumes of textual, photographic, and microfilm archival records.
The new center will help advance the agency’s goals of becoming primarily a digital records holder and being able to provide online access to its records.
“By far, the biggest change in our digitization capacity is the addition of three high-speed conveyor belt scanners that will enable the National Archives to safely scan fully prepared archival materials on a much larger scale than we have been able to do in the past,” Digitization Division Director Denise Henderson said.
“As part of our digitization strategy, we are developing our in-house digitization expertise and expanding our digitization capabilities,” Henderson said. “The digitization center is expected to digitize thousands of cubic feet per year, producing millions of new digital images per year of archival records that are currently only available for viewing in person at National Archives facilities.”
