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By Mitch Traphagen
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Every once in a while something emerges from the web that is cool well beyond the latest viral YouTube video. The National Archives Experience Digital Vaults is one of those things. This web site is one of the great reasons to have computers in society.
A mere 41 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the original document was already beginning to fade. In 1820, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned a printer to make a copper engraving of the document, reproducing the exact text, text size and signatures. It was no small feat as it had to be done as a mirror image. It took the printer, William J. Stone, three years to complete it but from his work, the government printed 200 copies for Federal, state and local officials. In 1976, Stone’s work was again put to use to print an additional seven copies as part of the bicentennial celebration.
Access to this important document may well have been lost without Stone’s work. And now, thanks to the Digital Vaults, everyone in the nation and around the world can see his engraving of our nation’s most precious document. What Stone had done for the Declaration of Independence, the National Archives Experience has done for all of American history in making it accessible to the public.
 The National Archives has more than 10 billion records in what are known as stacks. The Digital Vault has selected more than a thousand records of interest and importance and had them digitized for sharing with the world. From the Digital Vault you can see Mr. Stone’s work and in such detail that you can see for yourself just how difficult his job really was. You can also see notes written by President Lincoln — in his own hand — to General Grant, a photo of some of the handful of Titanic survivors in a lifeboat before they were rescued by the Carpathia, an aerial photo near Orlando before Disney World came to town and a photo of troops marching into Tampa during the Spanish-American War (no, they didn’t have problems with rush hour or a muck fire on I-4).
Most images are extremely high resolution and the details, upon zooming in, are fascinating. By clicking on one link, other related links are also provided, thus offering an immersion in which hours can be lost on almost any subject. A “shuffle records” option allows you to choose from hundreds of photos and documents — all available without having to travel to Washington, D.C. to dig through the stacks.
The Vaults also contain resources for teachers, students and researchers with options to print photographs and other records.
Get lost in the past — both the important and the whimsical at the National Archives Experience Digital Vaults at www.digitalvaults.org.
And speaking of the National Archives, you may well be a part of it all one day. If you’ve ever sent a tweet through your Twitter account, you will join the same historical club through which we know of the great presidents. Your words will be archived alongside those of the founders of our nation. What you had for breakfast (and told others about via Twitter) will be archived by the same organization charged with archiving the Gettysburg Address. You, my friends, are history in the making.
On April 14, the Library of Congress announced that Twitter will donate its digital archives of public tweets to the library. With currently more than 35 million tweets sent per day, roughly 600 every single second, that is no small bit of data.
The project is not quite as frivolous as it may seem. Tweets can be thought of as a literal second-by-second transcript of human history as it happens. In the past, history was largely the domain of the wealthy and famous. The average Joe Blows of the world tended not to rate much in the hallowed halls of the nation’s newspapers and archives. As a result, we know a lot about George Washington but not a heck of a lot about the people on his periphery, the workers at Mt. Vernon or the guy he secretly bought knitting needles from (yes, it has to be true, I read it on the Web). Today, those people could be sending tweets left and right but back then, not so much.
Now everyone has the opportunity to be a part of history. The bigger question, of course, is: Will anyone really care? I think they will. I think future generations will get a kick out of our insanity — and they’ll wonder how we managed to survive despite ourselves. And since every generation believes that later generations are lazy, good-for-nothings, they’ll finally learn the truth and take some comfort in the fact that some things never change.
For more information, visit www.digitalpreservation.gov.
And finally, speaking of George Washington, computers are not working in his favor. The Guardian newspaper from the United Kingdom has uncovered a bit of a scandal. It seems while our first president was well known for telling the truth, he wasn’t so hot on returning library books. The New York Society Library records have revealed that President Washington checked out an essay entitled the “Law of Nations” along with the twelfth volume of a collection of debates from the English House of Commons on October 5, 1789. The ledger shows the borrower as “President” but there is no return date noted. The books were due on Nov. 2, 1789.
According to the Guardian, his late fees, adjusted for inflation, would currently be around $300,000. Coincidentally, presidential pals Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had no such problems returning books they borrowed. Today, of course, people would be filling up the National Archives with tweets should such news break about either President Obama or Bush; but I think we could cut Washington some slack — and apparently the library already has. According to the article, they have no plans to pursue the late fees but would be very happy to get the books back. Yeah, with that kind of history the $300,000 in late fees would be small potatoes.
Read the entire article on their website.
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