How do you turn a piece of onionskin paper into an online archive? Or a huge map? Or a piece of paper almost completely torn up? Or all of that combined, times a billion?

A few months into her tenure, Colleen Shogan, the current Archivist of the United States, already has plenty on her plate. But it’s a little more complicated than just placing a document on a scanner.

President Joe Biden appointed Shogan to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in August 2022. Since her confirmation in May, Shogan and the NARA staff have been hard at work digitalizing the 13 billion records in the agency’s possession. That, according to Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright, requires various different scanners and technology to make sure it’s done right.

As the archivist, Shogan is the steward and protector of all of those documents, which include the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But digitalization is a key part of her plans for the agency — primarily because of the access it provides.

“I’m looking forward to serving as a passionate advocate for the work we do, namely strengthening our nation’s democracy through access and accountability,” Shogan told Technical.ly in an email.

To start, she’s focused on reducing the backlog of veterans’ requests, which piled up during the pandemic, at the National Personnel Records Center. These documents can help veterans and families with the documents they need for benefits. The agency has already made its way through a lot of the backlog, Shogan said, and is on track to eliminate it by January 2024.

Longer-term, the NARA has committed to digitalizing 500 million pages of records and making them available online to the public in the National Archives Catalog by Oct. 1, 2026. This will be achieved through a mix of in-house, contracted and public-private partnership-based digitalization. She also wants to improve the catalog’s search functionality, so the public has an easier time accessing what they need, and double down on providing documents and resources for educators to help student scores in history.

You can read a lot more about the future plans of the new Archivist in an article by Michaela Althouse published in the technical.ly web site at: https://technical.ly/civic-news/national-archives-record-administration-digitalization/.