NARA

As you may have heard, the National Archives issued a press release today announcing the release of three data sets on Data.gov:

The first milestone of the Open Government Directive was met on January 22 with the release of new datasets on Data.gov. Each major government agency has uploaded at least three datasets in this initial action. The National Archives released the 2007—2009 Code of Federal Regulations and two datasets from its Archival Research Catalog. This is the first time this material is available as raw data in XML format.

The Archival Research Catalog, or ARC, is NARA's primary access system for archival description, representing 68% of NARA's entire holdings. This breaks down to the following:

• 2,720,765 cubic feet
• 520 record groups
• 2,365 collections
• 102,598 series
• 3,265,988 file units
• 292,887 items

In addition, there are 6,354,765,793 logical data records and 465,050 artifacts described in ARC.

NARA's decision to share this data is a breakthrough for archives and people who love data. The size of the data provided by NARA in ARC is also immense; the combined descriptions plus contextual information on represented organizations totals approximately 21 gigabytes when uncompressed.