Researchers Feel the Pinch Of National Archives Cuts

The Archives is a major stop for professional and amateur historians. Its historical holdings range from the Declaration of Independence to census records and troop rosters. The Archives houses the famous photographs of Ansel Adams and Mathew Brady and many historic films.

The records at Archives II, the collections in College Park, cover 1.5 million cubic feet, about the equivalent of 3,300 football fields. The shelves cover 530 miles and it can take 30 minutes just to walk back through the corridors to retrieve a file.

At the six-story facility the researchers form a tight-knit community. Most are professionals working for lawyers and others -- gathering material for such things as lawsuits over Agent Orange or pending confirmation hearings. There are also historians and many genealogists, looking at such items as Granddad's military record.

Jan Alpert, the president of the National Genealogical Society, found some records for Thomas D. Nutter, her great-great-great-great-grandfather, who fought in the War of 1812. She located his pay records and extensive family information in the pension forms his widow filed. "I would not have found those records if they weren't being saved," said Alpert, who would like to see the Archives open more hours, not fewer. "We have a wonderful system, but it has to be accessible."

Because the Archives' holdings are unique, researchers have few other alternatives.

"Every single day I am touching actual Lincoln documents," says Karen S. Needles, a researcher who runs the research assistance firm Documents on Wheels and specializes in the Lincoln era.

Carren Kaston, another independent researcher, has used the Archives for 20 years and is looking through State Department papers at the Archives on behalf of a historian in Turkey. "He is interested in aspects of the U.S.-Turkey relations, included shipment of armaments to Turkey leading up to World War II, the papers from the U.S. Embassy in Turkey on the first Turkish president, Ataturk. They don't exist anywhere else," says Kaston.

Kaston organized her day around the Archives' old hours.

"I would stay home in the day and call repositories and contacts around the country for one project. Then I would go to the Archives and do the work that needed to be done there," she says. She also says she has experienced unusual delays in recent weeks, once waiting for 2 1/2 hours for documents, instead of the typical one hour. "The whole rhythm of working there has been severely disrupted," she adds.

The Archives managers say one of their problems is the mounting number of records that have arrived over the past 10 years -- 3 billion pages.

As a result, the Archives is battling a backlog that is equal to the amount of material already catalogued. The situation is bad but not insurmountable. "We know everything we have. We know where it is and we know how to retrieve it," says James J. Hastings, the director of Access Programs.

To solve some of its access problems, the Archives joined government agencies in exploring public-private partnerships to digitize collections. In a pilot project with Google, the company converted 100 of the Archives films to digital form. In the past, the Archives main desk got about 200 requests a year for a specialty film such as "The Eagle Has Landed: The Flight of Apollo 11." A few weeks after it was available on the Internet, it had been downloaded 200,000 times.

"This opens us up to an audience that doesn't know we existed," says Hastings.