Record Group 26: Records of the U.S. Coast Guard. Alaska Patrol - Bering Sea Expedition, 1948, Coast Guard Cutter Northwind. National Archives Identifier 205573798
It’s hard to believe we are wrapping up another year of online access!
As 2022 comes to a close, we want to take the opportunity to say thank you. We have much to be grateful for this year: our Catalog community and Citizen Archivists, the records we hold in trust, and our brand new Catalog!
We are thankful every day for your time and efforts making the records of the National Archives more searchable and accessible online. And a special thanks to each of you who participated in user research, feedback, and testing to help build our new Catalog. We couldn’t have done it without you.
The new Catalog focuses on scalability and is a new platform for the future. Just over a decade ago, the National Archives Catalog contained about 300,000 digital copies of records.
In the next few years we will grow to 500 million (that’s half a billion!) digitized pages. New backend enhancements will ensure an improved search experience for you as we grow.
A landing gear, ready for assembly on a B-25 bomber, is rolled into place on the final assembly line of North American's Inglewood, CA plant. National Archives Catalog 196384
New features of the new Catalog include faster search performance, improved mobile experience, enhanced image viewing, and a more user-friendly display of archival descriptions and authority records.
Additional benefits include Citizen Archivist enhancements, including more secure account access with login.gov, transcription autosave, and the ability to quickly see the types of contributions available on each page. More details can be found in the Get Started Transcribing Tutorial on our Resources page.
Update on Catalog Fixes
As excited as we are about our new Catalog, launching an entirely new system is a challenging, big task!
We heard your feedback, and we are pleased to share that our technical team recently pushed an update to the new Catalog with:
the remaining search facets (location, file format, and dates by year),
a fix to advanced search filters (including filtered keyword searches), and
a fix for the page navigation jumping issue.
For our Citizen Archivists, the following fixes related to contributions in the new Catalog have been implemented:
Smaller transcription window to allow more room to view the image while transcribing
A fix for the typing lag while typing and transcribing
A fix for certain records that would not unlock to start or edit a transcription
The “save and cancel” button in the transcription window has been fixed to close and release the contribution window.
The developers are still working on bugs and other fixes. We hope to have them resolved by January.
Military Administration - Field Post Offices - Some Christmas presents for the soldiers at Camp Mills, Mineola, Long Island. December 1917. National Archives Identifier 45500416
Thank you for being patient and bearing with us while the developers worked on these updates and bug fixes. We appreciate your engagement, feedback, questions, and documentation of issues and glitches that you’ve shared with us. We are also listening to your feedback on refinements and enhancements, and will keep these in mind as we plan for future Catalog development. We invite you to continue sharing your ideas in our feedback survey.
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.
