Attendance Triples At Archives Event That Was Forced Online By Sequestration

It’s become a platitude of sequestration that scaling back doesn’t have to mean limiting services and that austerity can sometimes breed innovation.

That platitude is sometimes proven true in simple ways, though, such as an annual genealogy fair hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration that made the move this year from onsite to online.

The nine-year old fair drew about 850 in-person one-day attendants to tents outside the National Archives building in Washington in 2012. This year the online fair, held Sept. 3 and 4, topped off at about 5,500 total daily views and more than 3,000 unique viewers. That’s more than three times the attendance at its onsite predecessor.

The online fair was a money saver too, said Bill Mayer, the Archives’ executive for research services. The entire online conference cost about $3,000, Mayer said. That’s compared with about $60,000 simply to rent the tents for the onsite version, he said.