The National Archives on Wednesday announced the hiring of its first “Wikipedian in Residence,” following a fledgling trend at cultural institutions that want to bring access to their collections to a wider audience on the Internet.

Dominic McDevitt-Parks is 24, a graduate student in history and archives management at Simmons College in Boston and a prolific Wikipedia contributor, with seven years of contributions, mostly in the area of Latin American history. …

His job this summer is to “foster collaboration between the Wikipedia community and the National Archives for their mutual benefit,” as Archivist of the United States David Ferriero put it, making the permanent records of the Archives available to the public through Wikipedia to reach a broader audience than ever before.