This morning's keynote was what is becoming a great annual tradition at Computers in Libraries: an interview of someone interesting by the energetic Paul Holdengraber of the New York Public Library. This year's interviewee was David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. Mr. Ferriero discussed his experience over the past 5 months as he as adjusted from being Mr. Holdengraber's boss at the New York Public Library, to taking on two of the most ambitious projects the National Archives and Records Administration has tackled in its history: the declassification of an estimated 400 million records dating back to World War II and the attempt to streamline, simplify, and regularize the record keeping of all of U.S. government agencies under the Open Government Initiative. He also described the mess facing NARA as they try to prevent the continuing loss of electronic records which he described as an issue which has the potential of keeping him up at night.
Ferriero also mentioned that he was currently reading Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter (a guilty pleasure) and had just finished reading Now the Drum of War : Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, which had been written using the letters of Whitman's wife which are housed at Duke University.
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