Improving our digital services to better serve you

Throughout this past year, the National Archives and Federal agencies have been working to implement the Digital Government Strategy by improving digital services to better serve you.

We’ve worked toward specific milestones that improve access to government information and we launched Archives.gov/digitalstrategy to report on our progress.  We sought your ideas for improvement in August and now you can see our progress toward making available mobile apps and web APIs.

Mobile:  We’ve mobile optimized FederalRegister.gov, released a mobile site for Presidential Documents, and a mobile app called “To the Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” which makes available photos, documents, and recordings from the related exhibit.

Presidential Docs Mobile Site

To the Brink Mobile App

To the Brink Mobile App 

Web APIs: We’ve expanded the FederalRegister.gov API to include the Public Inspection Desk and integration with Regulations.gov.  We’ve also included created an interactive dataset and API for Executive Orders from 1994 to 2012 on Data.gov.     

We continue to increase the records we make available on sites like Wikipedia and Flickr, which have robust mobile and web API capabilities.  These projects, in addition to our work on the Digital Public Library of America, greatly expand public access to government records.

Engaging Developers:  We launched Archives.gov/developer to promote innovative uses of our data and tools in the public and private sectors.  We’re participating in the National Day of Civic Hacking on June 1-2, 2013, by sponsoring several challenges related to visualizing historical datasets and developing a mobile app for researchers to easily upload digital images of historical records.  We’re looking forward to see what innovative solutions might be developed by the public.

National Day of Civic Hacking

All of our efforts, however, are only a piece of the larger Federal Government effort to improve digital services.  You can check out other agencies’ developer hubs and new mobile services and APIs, including a new API for the State Department’s Office of the Historian Ebook Catalog, which contains all of the ebooks from the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.

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