I returned to the National Archives today, catching the shuttle out to the Archives II out in College Park, Maryland. This is a huge and impressive facility, built in the early 1990s in response to NARA's growing space problems at the downtown DC building. I was greeted by Patrice Murray, who had put together my schedule for my visits this week, and after passing through security (which really is very strict here - you can't get in without showing government issued ID, so if you ever come, don't forget your passport!), was taken to meet Vernon Smith, who talked me through the process by which researchers register in order to access the archives. He then took me up to the textual reading room, which is a really lovely space - light and airy and with lots of windows. Vernon explained that there are several reading rooms and they are divided by type of material - textual, maps, audio-visual, and images - as well as having a separate reading room for classified material. The textual reading room was a hive of activity, and apparently gets very busy in the summer. He also took me through to see where material is held for readers once it has been called up - they hold things for 3 days at a time, for a maximum of a month. It usually takes an hour or so for material to be fetched. The reading rooms are fairly intensively staffed, as all material has to be checked before anyone can copy it or take digital photos, and there are also research support staff on hand to help people find the material they need - the shelves and shelves of finding aids were a really clear reminder of how complicated this is.

After this introduction, I was taken down to the lecture room where I was due to give my talk. I'd been asked by the National Archives Assembly if I would give a presentation on supporting US history at Oxford, which was a great opportunity to share some information about the VHL, RAI and Bodleian Libraries. The talk was recorded too and will be distributed for staff in the regional offices to see as well.

Talk over, I was given a more extensive tour of the building by Patrice, and given some more background on the history of the facility. I also got to see the library there, which I hadn't even realised existed, but which contains a pretty sizeable collection of reference works which are there to support researchers who are working with the archival records.

In the afternoon I met a few other staff members for a wide-ranging discussion on all sorts of aspects of the National Archives work, particularly relating to access to records, their website and digitisation work, and use of social media - all the areas I'm particularly interested in. I learnt a huge amount from this discussion. I hadn't fully appreciated before a lot of the restrictions that are placed on records, even once they become available. A huge amount of material hasn't been fully reviewed, and has to be checked when someone requests it, so that even when you do come and place your request, that doesn't necessarily mean that you will get to see that material if it fails this review process. There is a sixty year rule in play here - records older than 1952 are generally available no problem, but for more recent records there's no guarantee, due, quite understandably, to concerns over personal data etc. Unfortunately though there is no way to tell from the catalogue whether something is going to be available. And an awful lot of their holdings are not yet in the online catalogue - something else I hadn't fully appreciated before. Almost everything at Archives I is there, but less than half of the records at Archives II are described in the catalogue. They are obviously working very hard to get through the backlog, but it's a huge task. Nonetheless, they are doing great work at improving their catalogue and I sense a real desire to get as much as possible in there and make it really the resource that researchers want.

Another thing I hadn't really realised before was the division between the civilian and military records, and the various different constituents that the Archives serve. Veterans are huge users of NARA records, often for making claims, and along with genealogists, make up the majority of researchers at the National Archives. Coming from an academic library and being used to thinking in terms of the needs of historians, this was illuminating and kind of reframes how I think about the way the Archives work. This whole area also explains a lot of the decisions in terms of where material is kept - the material kept in downtown DC is largely the kind of stuff that genealogists are particularly interested in, as that is where those users tend to be, for example.

I also learnt more about the various digitisation projects that are ongoing (largely genealogically driven with partners such as ancestry.com and fold3.com), and the Archives use of social media, which was particularly interesting in comparison to what I heard on the same topic at the Library of Congress yesterday. Then, before catching the shuttle back into DC, I got a quick peek into one of the stacks, as well as a brief conversion with the member of staff who is managing the Textual Services Divison's blog, The Text Message. All in all, it was another excellent and illuminating day!