The project, still in the developmental phase, will eventually result in a virtual card catalog of all NARA holdings nationwide, including those in the Presidential libraries and regional archives. NAIL is an online searchable database that contains information about a wide variety of NARA's holdings across the country. Although NAIL contains more than 3,300 microfilm publications descriptions and 558,690 archival holdings descriptions, it represents only a limited portion of NARA's vast holdings. As part of the EAP, NARA has also digitized copies of the National Archives most popular and significant manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings, maps, drawings and other documents. The 124,000 digital copies are available for researchers to view online through NAIL .
Users are able to search the descriptions in the system by title, subject, or other keywords.