Hundreds of Items Missing From National Archives

The Archives does not have an item-by-item control system, except for materials at the presidential libraries. The experts on each item and its storage are the longtime employees. While people are researching, they are permitted to examine only one box of items at a time.

Until recently the Archives had few measurements for the value of a document. Collectors and autograph dealers had selling prices, but the Archives believed that the high value was historic.

Now the Internet is helping collectors find some documents that the Archives didn't know were missing and set the price. The Aubitz crime was discovered when one of the items appeared for sale on eBay.

A remedy is broad vigilance in the manuscript market, Brachfeld said.

Brachfeld is urging employees and researchers to participate in an awareness campaign, started last March, that monitors auctions, catalogues and the growing number of Internet sales.

Already they have recovered a letter written by the Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead that is not mentioned in the investigative reports. "A person saw a document being traded," Brachfeld said. That researcher alerted the Archives that he had used the source -- a letter written by Armistead when he retired from the federal army to join the Confederate troops. Archives officials then noted the disappearance, and the matter is being investigated by the Justice Department, Brachfeld said.

But will the Archives ever recover a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt by Ellen Emmet Rand?

The portrait is missing from the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., part of the domain of the Archives. It was shown at the Archives in Washington, then shipped back to the library in 2001. It remained in the 250-pound crate while the New York library building was being renovated. The crate and the portrait were declared missing early this year. The theories as to where it went include old-fashioned theft and work crews accidentally sending it off to a landfill.