Some of the most powerful images in the United States come from the clean white rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery. But as haunting and pride-inducing those ‘gardens of stone’ are, their austerity doesn’t exactly make them easy to navigate. That, however, is about to change, thanks to — what else? — an app.The cemetery, which sits right across the Potomac from D.C., is soon to be the first in the nation with 4G wireless coverage. To capitalize on that, the Army has developed a smartphone app to guide visitors to specific grave sites. It’s to be released this fall.The system is said to be the first for a federal cemetery, and is apparently a response to the records scandal at Arlington two years ago, in which hundreds of graves were found to be mixed up and misidentified. Record-keeping at Arlington is not an easy task; more than 300,000 individuals are buried there, and an average of 27 new burials are scheduled every day. The new app is a chance for the cemetery to show off its work digitizing burial records while also making one of the nation’s most visited cemeteries more accessible.From USA Today:Kathryn Condon, executive director of the Army National Cemeteries Program, holds up a tattered map and a 3-by-5-inch index card to illustrate how burial records were kept when she arrived two years ago Sunday to whip Arlington into shape.
"We were one fire away from having all our records destroyed," Condon says. Fixing the problem "was real simple — give them the right training. Give them the standards, and most importantly make sure they have the right equipment."The Arlington records scandal shined a light on just how reliant the government still is on paper records and archaic filing systems. (To be fair, there are hundreds of years of records to deal with.) But the new app shows that Arlington is serious about future-proofing its records, and it’s nice to see non-combat sectors of the military keeping up with the pace of tech innovation. Heck, the IT folks at Arlington claim their new system will be more advanced than anything in the private sector, which means the military’s best innovators aren’t just working on crazy weapons.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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