NARA to Accelerate the Processing of Records
at Three Presidential Libraries

Adrienne Thomas, Acting Archivist of the U.S.

In the past few years, the National Archives has been engaged in a major project to eliminate the huge backlog of unprocessed records in its Washington area facilities.

The results have been impressive—thirty-seven percent of this backlog has been processed and appropriately described in our Archival Research Catalog and made available for efficient research at NARA over the past two years.

Now, we are launching a project to deal with a backlog of unprocessed records and unfulfilled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests at the three presidential libraries governed by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and whose records are currently subject to FOIA requests—the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and William J. Clinton libraries.

In the aftermath over the dispute of ownership of the presidential materials of Richard M. Nixon, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It declared all official presidential records to be government property, beginning with the first new presidential administration after the bill was enacted. It also stipulated that anyone could file a FOIA request for access to these records five years after the end of an administration.

The president’s budget request for fiscal year 2009 and the subsequent congressional appropriation included funding for fifteen new archivists and six new archives technicians to increase the archival staff at these libraries in order to speed up the processing of the records and shorten our response time to FOIA requests. Here is the plan:

First, we are compiling and reviewing folder-level inventories for all presidential records to make those inventories publicly available on each of the libraries’ web pages. We believe this will result in requests for fewer records since researchers will have a better guide as to content and context of our holdings and be able to identify more precisely the records they want us to process—and within those records to prioritize what they want processed first.

The Reagan Library has already posted the majority of these titles on its web site, <http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/>.

Second, we will limit the number of textual pages that we will provide an individual requester at any given time to no more than 50,000; after that, the requester will have to go to the back of the FOIA queue. As a result of limiting the number of pages per requester at any one time, we will be able to service more customers since requesters will not get stalled behind very large FOIA requests. For the same reasons, we have also limited the number of electronic records we will process for any one requester to 500 hits or 15,000 pages and have placed caps on the number of fulltime equivalent staff (FTE) that will be dedicated to processing electronic records.

Third, each library has committed staff to systematically reviewing records, which is significantly faster than processing in response to individual FOIA requests. Systematic review of series and subseries of records has the added benefit of getting more records into the public domain, and thus decreasing the number of records that need to be processed in response to FOIA requests.

Under this plan, we expect to see significant results.

In 2010, we expect to process 150,000 to 200,000 more pages than this year, for a total of 1.5 million pages to be processed at the Reagan Library. At the Bush Library, we are expecting a one hundred percent increase in processed pages of records. At the Clinton Library, we expect four hundred percent increase in processed records.

We believe that these new procedures will, when fully implemented, result in a yearly increase of more than 1.3 million pages processed, a one hundred percent increase over FY 2008. We are also studying other methods of improving records processing to open even more records to the public.

At the same time, the additional staff will help us deal with the increasing quantity of electronic records that we must process, especially with the Clinton administration, and even more with the records of the George W. Bush administration. George W. Bush’s library is being built on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and is now located at a temporary site in Lewisville, Texas. Under the 1978 legislation, the Bush records will be available to FOIA requests on January 20, 2014.

NARA’s other presidential libraries, from Hoover to Carter, are not subject to the 1978 legislation. All of their papers were deeded to the government by the former presidents, except in the case of Nixon. In the aftermath of the Watergate controversy, which led to Nixon’s resignation, Congress seized those materials in 1974 and held them in the Washington area. With the transfer of the private Nixon library to NARA in 2007, those records are being moved to the NARA-operated Nixon facility in Yorba Linda, California.

This plan for the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton libraries represents a significant staff commitment to meeting our goals of getting more information about these administrations out to the public. It also provides a framework for efficient operation of the George W. Bush Library when it opens.

We will continue to work on improving our plans as we learn from our efforts what works and what does not. Our goal is to open as many presidential records as possible in the shortest time possible to the American public.