[or-roots] Re: NY Times editorial

[LinLouVan at aol.com]

This was sent to me by a fellow genealogist and I thought it might be  
interesting to others.
Linda VanOrden
Junction City, OR
 
        
 
Op-Ed Contributor 
History Lessens   
By DAVID KAHN 
Published: March 19, 2007 
Great Neck,  N.Y. 
EVERYBODY knows how  to use a library. You look up the card catalogue in the 
computer, type in the  subject, find the Dewey Decimal System number, walk to 
the shelf and get the  book.  
It’s different with  an archive, where unpublished memorandums, reports, 
notes and letters are  organized not by topic but by the agency that created them. 
You have to know  which agency did the work you are interested in, and 
whether more than one was  involved. The complexity of government means first-time 
archive users need help.   
Alone among the  world’s great archives, the National Archives of the United 
States has offered  such assistance to visitors. At Britain’s Public Record 
Office, for instance, a  courteous official points to rows of volumes listing 
the contents of files for  the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, Scotland Yard. 
After that, you’re on your  own. It is much the same at France’s Archives 
Nationales and Germany’s  Bundesarchiv. Only at the big modern Archives II building 
in College Park, Md.,  will an archivist sit down and guide a user through the 
maze.   
But that precious  advantage is being lost — and it’s all started to change 
in the last few months.  More than a million cubic feet of documents, nearly 
enough to fill the  Washington Monument, need to be organized, described and 
filed. This “document  surplus” — a term the archivist of the United States, 
Allen Weinstein, prefers  to “backlog” — was caused in part by the wait for a 
new archives building and by  a new emphasis on electronic records. But mainly, 
with no increase in its budget  in years, it comes down to a lack of money.  
As a result, the  archives have hired less-experienced personnel to organize 
the records, often  resulting in people having to hunt longer for what they 
need. And although 50  professionals have recently been moved to processing, 
that has left only 22  archivists to deal with the public — and with records they 
do not know well.  Moreover, instead of conferring at their desks, with 
reference books at hand,  the archivists now answer the questions of walk-ins in a 
glass-enclosed room on  the busy main research floor.  
Written requests for  information should be answered in 10 working days, 
something the archives once  did 95 percent of the time; this year it is 75 
percent. In the military and  civil branch the backlog of unanswered letters used to 
be 15 to 30; now it is  115 to 130. The financial squeeze has also cut 
off-peak hours to two nights and  one Saturday each month, making research difficult 
for visitors from afar, and  for anyone who works a 9 to 5 job.  
Why does this  matter? Because the National Archives does more than display 
the Declaration of  Independence and the Constitution. From its astonishing 
riches emerge not only  the records of one’s immigrant grandparents but the 
documents and images that  produce books and telecasts about this country. Without 
the services of the  archives, the nation risks amnesia and loses direction. 
The president should ask  for the few millions the archives needs to do its job 
right, and Congress should  appropriate it. America must not forget itself. 
David Kahn is the author of “The  Codebreakers.”  





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