Transcript: My First Two Years: Access Issues at the National Archives
The full text of a recent speech at the National Press Club by Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States.
From the speech:
Turning to NARA: I have now served as Archivist of the United States for two years and bring you a brief interim report on this process as it applies to today’s topic. First, as always, follow the funding. Despite the generosity of the President’s 2008 budget for NARA, we need additional resources if we are to fulfill our mission. But even with available funds, there has been visible progress on a number of our strategic goals in the past two years, goals linked to NAR’s newly adopted 10-year Strategic Plan:
+ We are making steady progress towards an Electronic Records Archives (ERA) that will ensure preservation of, and access to, today’s electronic records far into the future.
+ We are working closely with the intelligence community and other key agencies to ensure that we can build a National Declassification Initiative to transform the way documents are reviewed and released.
+ We are working with the private sector in partnerships to digitize key collections, to ensure the widest possible access for the American public, and to build a Learning Center at the National Archives in Washington that will parallel the wonderful learning labs that we have across the country, among a number of educational programs we have, using documents and designed to strengthen civic literacy.
+ We have started an effort to replace the existing inadequate Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis with a facility that will provide critical improvements to the environmental storage conditions for the two million cubic feet of records we store for the military. The new facility will enable us to ensure the preservation of essential military personnel files so they will be there when they are needed by our country’s veterans to guarantee their rights and entitlements.
+ We are completing the planning to bring the privately held Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, into the family of Federal Presidential libraries.
+ We are working with the White House to organize a smooth transfer of the textual and digital records of the current administration to the National Archives and to plan for the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
Source: NARA
See Also: Coming Next Week at NARA-Adelphi:
href=”http://www.archives.gov/preservation/conferences/2007/”>21st Annual Preservation Conference Managing the Intangible: Creating, Storing and Retrieving Digital Surrogates of Historical Materials
