The US' National Archives and Records Administration has announced that a new Online Public Access prototype is being made available to the public at http://www.archives.gov/research/search.
The National Archives' flagship initiative in its Open Government plan is to develop online services to meet the 21st century needs of the public. It is also a key component of the agency's Transformation Plan, to be customer-focused and ensure that the nation's heritage is accessible to all.
The Online Public Access prototype is a public portal that provides access to digitised records, and information about the records. It also provides a centralised means of searching multiple National Archives resources at once. Currently, researchers perform separate searches in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) for catalogue descriptions, histories and biographies; Access to Archival Databases (AAD) for electronic records; and Archives.gov. The new interface illustrates a streamlined search experience for users, searching across all of these resources.
The prototype currently contains all of the data from ARC, and seven series from AAD, containing 10.9 million permanent electronic records. Additionally, the prototype provides access to one million electronic records currently in the Electronic Records Archives, which are not available elsewhere online.
The National Archives will add additional functionality in the coming year, including an image zooming feature that will enable users to zoom and pan its online holdings, and social sharing through Facebook, Twitter and other sites.
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