The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently announced that it was sunsetting the History Hub (historyhub.history.gov). NARA management has stated that eliminating the History Hub would save about $370,000 annually.

The History Hub became frozen in time on January 15, 2026, and will “remain available for reference until February 13, 2026.” NARA’s general email address for questions will continue to be inquire@nara.gov. Individual NARA units also have email addresses.

I do not speak for NARA nor any person involved in the creation or administration of the History Hub website. My thoughts are my own.

It was an idea worth trying.

It was a collaboration between NARA and the Library of Congress, which are two separate institutions with two quite different missions but who serve many of the same constituencies – genealogists, historians, and any and all researchers in need of facts. 

It was a collaboration in crowdsourcing between NARA and the researching public.  Public conversations between NARA and researchers. Public conversations between researchers. Not every question is appropriate for a public conversation on the web, but where privacy is not an issue, such conversations might serve to educate by example other researchers who have the same, or substantially the same, question.

It’s hard to discern how well the History Hub’s “education” function worked. One can count “questions asked” but counting the flip side is impossible. There is no way to count the number of questions not asked because someone learned the answer from something already posted on the History Hub. Unfortunately, it was also true that many researchers didn’t realize that their question was “the same or substantially the same” as a question already posted on the History Hub (or they didn’t look or figure out how to look for previous questions/answers).

Also, unfortunately, the History Hub led to some inefficiency arising from many researchers posting their question on the History Hub and simultaneously writing to inquire@nara or a specific NARA unit. Simultaneously submission like that was certainly wasteful of staff time and effort. At best, the duplicate question might be routed to the same staff person, who could respond internally and to the questioner that the question had already been answered in thus and such manner. At worst, the question might get routed to a different staff member who would have to reinvent the wheel, as it were, by drafting their own answer.

Materials that I authored on the History Hub will remain accessible at https://twelvekey.com/blog-posts-on-other-sites/ with links to that content on the Internet Archive. At a future date, I will make that material available in a different format.