How to Preserve Priceless Documents at the National Archives (2024)

1 Step 1: Founding Documents

The National Archives holds some of the country’s most storied documents.

The National Archives has been responsible for preserving federal records since 1934. Its primary building in downtown Washington is part research library, part administrative office and part museum. Key founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — are displayed in its rotunda.

The agency takes extreme precaution to slow the degradation of these fragile records, made of parchment and featuring iron gall ink.

Before the rotunda opens to the public, Dong Eun Kim, a senior exhibition conservator, checks the light levels. Because light causes ink to fade, the rotunda is kept dim — about five candles’ worth of light, or 60 lumens.

2 Step 2: Storing Documents

Federal agencies pack up their records, which are shipped to a National Archives facility.

When a department runs low on space, it boxes up older files and sends them to record centers operated by the National Archives. The department still legally controls the records stored there, but ownership later shifts to NARA.

Presidential records are different. When an administration comes to an end, White House files are immediately transferred to the custody of the National Archives.

Archivists place newly acquired records in acid-free Hollinger boxes, trying to replicate their arrangement when officials still used them, and create a rough index of their contents.

One of the most popular collections are pension records of Civil War veterans, which are particularly useful to genealogists and historians documenting the lives of ordinary soldiers.

At the National Archives’ main operations center in College Park, Md., Tim Enas, director of the textual records division, operates mobile shelving that compresses stacks and creates more storage.

William J. Bosanko, the chief operating officer of the National Archives, recently told Congress that it is storing 555,000 cubic feet of classified information — about five and a half football fields with floor-to-ceiling shelving of national security materials.

While classified records are supposed to be stored apart, under every administration covered by the Presidential Records Act, the agency has found some classified material mixed into boxes of unclassified White House files, Mr. Bosanko said. As a precaution, the agency therefore initially treats everything from the White House as if it were top secret, he said.

The agency also conserves many other materials. These stacks hold maps created by state highway departments and the Federal Bureau of Roads from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Most stacks are kept from 50 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. More sensitive records, like acetate film, are stored at colder temperatures.

The agency has 40 million historical aerial images of the United States. These metal canisters contain rolls of 10-inch film with aerial photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s.

3 Step 3: Preservation

Conservators at a College Park lab clean and stabilize older records.

Understandings about how to best stabilize fragile older documents have evolved, and a common task is undoing steps by archivists a century ago. To reinforce records, previous generations would glue on a transparent layer of silk, but subsequent archivists realized that this was acidic and could harm the paper.

Each document can take about three weeks to de-silk. Yoonjoo Strumfels, a senior conservator, dabs on deionized water and chemical reagents to test the stability of the ink, verifying that silking can be safely removed.

The archivists soak the document to dissolve the glue and then peel off the old silking. This paper document is a petition that was sent to the first Congress in 1789 by a man urging lawmakers to enact a copyright law.

The poster boards, which include arrays of photographs and captions, were intended to show what life was like at the schools.

Lauren Varga, a senior conservator, consolidates the laminated layers of paper where they have started to fray over time. She painstakingly feeds an adhesive through the layers.

4 Step 4: Digitization

The National Archives scans old documents so that they can be made available online.

Most records can be digitized using regular flatbed scanners. But others are glued together in the corners — a precursor to staples — so flattening them would crease pages.

The archives uses a special scanner for such three-dimensional materials, like these military record about so-called Buffalo Soldiers, African American troops in the Indian Wars in the West, being digitized by Catherine Brandsen, an innovation hub coordinator.

Increasingly, records that are digital from the start are transferred online. But the National Archives still acquires some via physical media, which it will dispose of after copying the files.

Drives with files from the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, which operated from 2019 to 2020, wait to be processed.

The electronic holdings at the archives are around 835 terabytes. But about 350 terabytes come from only two sources: images of bubble forms people filled out for the 2000 and 2010 census.

Typically, only 3 to 5 percent of records are considered to have permanent value. For example, documents on hard drives will be kept, but operating system files will not.

From the 1970s until 2008, the National Archives preserved electronic records on magnetic tape. It now uses a cloud server repository, along with an online catalog for materials available to the public. The catalog holds more than 205 million pages of records.

Theodore Hull, the director of NARA’s electronic records division, uploads digital files to the catalog.

Some of the National Archives’ holdings remain unavailable. The Presidential Records Act shields White House files from public access for five to 12 years after a president leaves office, and ordinary researchers may not peruse material that remains classified. The agency has the power to declassify materials after 25 years.

Once files are opened to the public, the National Archives operates 34 reading rooms. Researchers come to access its collection, asking archivists to retrieve from the stacks boxes of material that range from obscure documents to storied records in the country’s history.