By Marielle Gage, Certified Archivist
If you have been to Washington, DC as a student or tourist, you have likely been to the National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the headquarters of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the permanent home of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Photograph of the United States National Archives Building, Washington D.C. 19 May 2010: David Samuel
This exhibit, called the Charters of Freedom, is a masterwork of access and preservation, as the priceless documents are displayed in a cool, secure (water and bullet proof), low-light, and non-flammable argon-gas environment, yet remain visible to more than a million visitors a year. Yet, despite being perhaps the crown jewel of Washington’s extensive cultural heritage offerings, the Rotunda display is not NARA’s only treasure.
In a recent 60 Minutes segment, the National Archives was called “American’s security deposit box”. It is an apt analogy – the National Archives Building holds treasures such as the Louisiana Purchase treaty, Richard Nixon’s resignation letter, and the oath of loyalty George Washington administered to his troops in the Continental Army. And, in addition to the Charters of Freedom, NARA’s headquarters houses the Records of Rights permanent exhibit and several temporary exhibits at any given time. NARA stores records generated by all three branches of government, so these temporary exhibits cover a myriad of different topics and time periods.
Origins of NARA
NARA was officially founded in 1934, to ensure preservation of and access to America’s governmental records. While no more than 5% of all records generated each year by the US government is permanently deposited in the National Archives, the collection is still staggeringly huge – 13.5 billion pages of textual records, more than 725,000 artifacts, 450 million feet of film, 41 million photographs, and 837 terabytes of electronic records, among other holdings. Some of these holdings pre-date the official founding of the National Archive and Records Administration, going all the way back to the nation’s founding and beyond. These records were inherited from other institutions, such as the Library of Congress, as well as holdings from the independent branches of government, who before the establishment of NARA were responsible for maintaining their own archives, with mixed results.
NARA’S mission is to “drive openness, cultivate, public participation, and strengthen our nation’s democracy through equitable public access to high-value government records.” To meet this mission, NARA has digitized more than 239,000,000 pages of their holdings for remote access, as well as facilitated in-person research requests in their reading rooms, as well as off-site research and veteran records requests (143,000 and 1.2 million respectively in 2019, the last year full data is available on NARA’s website).
Beyond Washington, DC
NARA’s mission is not confined to their headquarters in Washington, DC. NARA maintains regional archives scattered across the continental United States, as well as the official presidential libraries of all chief executives since Hubert Hoover (it is worth noting that libraries do exist for some presidents before Hoover, but they are not under the governance of the National Archives). Currently, the brick-and-mortar libraries are open for all presidents through Barrack Obama, though as of writing the location and opening of President Trump’s library is yet to be announced. In the interim, NARA maintains the Trump Presidential Library website to facilitate open access and research into his presidency. When built, his library will probably follow a similar model of storage and access as Obama’s, as both men’s governments operated using overwhelmingly digital-born documents, and so their records centers will have to be configured to address the challenges of that format’s preservation and access, as opposed to the more traditional model that concerned itself primarily with wood-pulp paper and photographic prints. Each of these institutions are open to visitors (though some will require scheduled appointments to view records, and not all records may be open to the casual researcher).
Not that you necessarily have to physically travel to a repository anymore. The catalog is available online for anyone to browse, and an incredible amount of NARA’s holdings have been digitized to provide access to students, teachers, researchers, or just the curious public. It’s not just legislative bills and the Federal Register, either – one example I particularly enjoy is the White House Menu Files from the Truman administration. It’s a smaller collection but, as the menus vary from a picnic lunch for Margaret to a men-only state dinner for the Prince Regent of Belgium, it provides a fun glimpse into both culinary trends and the use of food in political life.
Founders Online
In addition to its own holdings, NARA has partnered with other historical and cultural heritage institutions to disseminate American records. One of the larger projects have been Founders Online, a massive effort to digitize more than 180,000 individual documents written by or to the Founding Fathers collected from libraries, museums, and archives across the country.
If you want to participate in NARA’s work of increasing access to America’s records, you can help by participating in the Citizen Archivist project. This initiative is harnessing the power of crowdsourcing to increase the number of transcribed and tagged records available online.
Pre-1880, official documents were still written by hand, and handwriting can be incredibly difficult for machine learning and OCR programs to decipher correctly. By transcribing the document manually, a Citizen Archivist makes the document discoverable in the Catalog, as well as increases access for those perhaps less able to read the handwriting due to vision or language concerns.
Tagging, meanwhile, is assigning keywords to a record to increase its discoverability in a search. A military post-operations report might get buried in the Catalog; but tag it with keywords “World War Two”, “Metz (France)”, and “Operational reports” and it is much more likely that a researcher will be successful in finding the record.
Julia Child’s Oath of Office, November 18, 1942. National Archives Identifier: 121635413.
Too many people, if they consider archives at all, view them as dusty repositories of dead documents. But I hope this gives a glimpse of how vibrant, vital, and alive the National Archives’ collection is. It is far more than shelves upon shelves of defunct National Registers (though even those hold valuable research value, if you know how to approach them). It’s more than even the Rotunda, and the display of our country’s most essential principles. It’s nationalization records and expedition journals; it’s slave ship manifests and Japanese internment survivors’ interviews; it’s World War II photographs and the Zimmerman Telegram. All tell a part of the American story – of our story. Take a look, and see what part of your country’s, your family’s, or even your own history you can uncover!
Radio Log of the Last Communications of Amelia Earhart, page 1, July 1, 1937. National Archives Identifier: 6210268.
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