FlipSide: BLM: In search of history

History runs deep at the General Land Office Web site, which debuted 10 years ago this month.

The Bureau of Land Management at the Interior Department established the Web site, at www.glorecords.blm.gov, during the dot-com boom of the 1990s that marked the early days of e-government.

The site’s mission is to digitize more than 9 million documents related to public lands that have been transferred to private ownership during the past 200-plus years. A team of 10 BLM employees scans those records and posts them online in a searchable database.

The team has digitized about 4.2 million records so far with a goal of posting another 200,000 this year. Now researchers who once had to wait two or three weeks for BLM staff to locate records often can find documents for themselves in a matter of seconds.

Source: Federal Computer Week

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 8:26 am and is filed under Access to Information, Archives and Special Collections, Digitization Projects, Info Management and Retrieval, Search News, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.