I am proud to announce the publication of our fourth Open Government Plan. To get started, check out the Executive Summary, which provides an overview of the commitments the agency is making to make the National Archives and the Federal government more open over the next two years.
We want to hear from you! This plan is a living document and we will update it over time based on the feedback we receive.
We have published this plan on the social coding platform, Github so that the public can provide feedback through the “Discuss” feature and can suggest edits through the “Edit” function. If this is not your preferred method of feedback, please check out all available feedback opportunities, provide comments below on this blog post, or emailopengov@nara.gov.
As we look forward to the next two years, I am confident that we will continue to strengthen and build momentum for our efforts to provide transparency, and foster greater participation and collaboration in our work so that we can better serve the public.
We employ a wide variety of approaches and opportunities in an effort to create a culture which embraces diversity and inclusion. We are making a commitment from the top of the Agency to ensure that this is core to who we are and how we do business. Are we there yet? No. But I am confident that together we can create a more inclusive work for NARA and for the Federal Government.
Read the full post, and my remarks, on the AOTUS blog.
Declassification highlights from this FY 2015 report include:
A 14 percent increase in original classification activity, for a 2015 total of 53,425 decisions.
A 32 percent decrease in derivative classification action, down to 52,778,354 decisions.
Under automatic, systematic, and discretionary declassification review, agencies reviewed 87,192,858 pages and declassified 36,779,589 pages of historically valuable records. This was a 35 percent increase in the number of pages reviewed and 32 percent increase in the number of pages declassified.
Agencies reviewed 391,103 pages under mandatory declassification review and declassified 240,717 pages in their entirety, declassified 109,349 pages in part, and retained classification of 41,037 pages in their entirety.
I am very proud of the work of our ISOO staff in ensuring that the Government protects and provides proper access to information to advance the national and public interest.
We use this annual self-assessment to determine whether Federal agencies
are compliant with statutory and regulatory records management requirements as
well as to identify trends and areas where further guidance may be necessary.
Federal agencies use the annual self-assessment to identify strong and
weak areas of their records management programs and to determine the impact of
changes they have made since the previous self-assessment.
As a whole, the data in this report is used to improve records
management practices within the Federal Government. Records management is
the backbone of open government; effective records management by all Federal
agencies ensures the preservation and access of the permanently valuable
records of the Federal Government.
On June 30, 2016, President Obama signed the bipartisan Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) Improvement Act of 2016 into law. This law locks
into place many of the Administration’s FOIA policies and initiatives and
solidifies the role of the National Archives’ Office of Government Information
Services (OGIS) in resolving FOIA disputes between agencies and requesters and
improving compliance with FOIA.
In conjunction with the bill signing, the White
House also announced additional initiatives to continue to improve
transparency. As part of this effort, the White House asked the members of the
FOIA Advisory Committee to look broadly at the challenges that agency FOIA
programs will face in light of an ever-increasing volume of electronic records,
and chart a course for how FOIA should operate in the future.
We welcome Congress’s bipartisan, bicameral
work to advance transparency, and the President’s new initiatives.
The National Archives Catalog has reached a milestone: we now have 95% of our holdings completely described at the series level in our online catalog. This is a monumental achievement. Why? Because the National Archives holds over 14 billion pages of records, and we are adding hundreds of millions of pages to that total every year.
Describing our records in the online Catalog means that the information for all of those holdings is in one central place for researchers anywhere to search and browse, and is vital to our strategic goal to Make Access Happen. Description enables us to provide the archival context of records as they are shared and re-used by researchers, citizen developers, and the public.
Without description, the public will not have enough information to access and make use of the records. Fundamental to the archival profession, description shines a light on our holdings so the public can search and make use of the records of the National Archives, increasing transparency and accountability in our democracy.
chibikitsunefur asked: Did Ross Perot take back that copy of the Magna Carta? My brother sais it wasn't on display anymore last time he went to the National Archives.
faith-in-the-rain asked: Who has touched the Declaration of Independence in the past 100 years? I know people aren't allowed to touch it, but somebody has to dust it every once in awhile, ya know? So basically, I'm asking who the official national dusters of the Declaration of Independence are.
The only dusters here deal with the space around the Declaration!
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