First Visit to the National Archives

I just spent two days at the US National Archives at College Park, MD. It is a truly wonderful place to work as a researcher. Sunlight streams through the windows in the wide open reading room on the second floor where researchers sit at well spaced workstations with their happily plugged in laptops and work a box at a time from a trolley full of boxes delivered to them during the several archive “pull times” throughout the day. One corner of the second floor is filled with copy machines and a long “research assistance” room behind the workspace area is staffed by often elderly looking archivists who command the range of obscure knowledge required to guide you in requesting the materials most likely to be useful for your research.

To get to the National Archives complex (Archives II) I simply hopped on the Green Line of the Metro and took it to Greenbelt, where I took the R3 bus that goes into the archive campus and will drop you off near the entrance (you can probably get off at one of the earlier Metro stops and take the bus from there as R3 passes several Green Line stops).

There are a few rules and procedures a researcher has to go through to get to their materials but on the whole I found the whole process very smooth and everyone respectful and helpful along the way. When you enter the building you have to put your luggage through an X-Ray machine and go through a regular airport check-in-like screening. If it is your first visit, you then turn right and enter the orientation room where they make you view a computer slide presentation summarizing the important rules and fill out an on-screen form to register yourself as a researcher. After this you are issued a photo ID “researcher card” on the spot which is valid for one year. There are lockers in the basement to store most your possessions. All I brought in with me was my laptop, power cable, headphones, and a few stapled sheets of paper with some notes listing what archival documents I wanted to look at. No bags or pens are allowed inside (they provide pencils, note cards, and paper once you get in), papers brought in have to be approved/stamped, and laptops, scanners, and other equipment need to be registered. When you exit the protected area you have to check the serial number of your equipment against the registration receipt, open laptops to show that no documents are hidden within, and any photocopies you make while on the inside have “Secret” or “Confidential” etc. blacked out if this is written on them, get stamped “Declassified” and identified as copies.

Whenever you enter and leave the protected area they swipe your card. Whenever you enter a room to work in, they swipe your card, and check your materials when you leave. I never felt this process to be that annoying however, and the archivists were incredibly friendly everywhere I went. I left my belongings and microfilms at my workstation whenever I went downstairs and outside the protected area to visit their nice cafe or the convenience store for a snack.

I was impressed by the huge variety of people doing research here.

When you register they ask you what kind of material you are looking for, to make sure you are located at the correct archive complex. There were two women ahead of me. One said she wanted to look at files related to deportations from the United State 1910s to 1920s. The next woman who had a heavy Dutch or perhaps German sounding accent had some problems with her English listening comprehension but when she fully understood the question said she had come to look at World War II documents. I’m sure she had a lot to look at. Just one shelf of “Guidebooks” to the microfilm holdings near me in the microfilm room had separate guides for Guides to Microfilmed Records of the German Navy, 1850-1945 Volumes 1-5, Guides to Microfilmed Records on U-Boat Warfare, Guides to Captured German Records (Several boxes of guides), Record Guides to POW camps, Guide to Berlin Document Center: Russia-Ukraine, SS Officer Personnel Files Guide, SA Files Guide, SS Women Personnel Files Guide, etc.

Inside there were a lot of people clearly working on US history. There were a few younger researchers, perhaps PhD students like myself working on their dissertation, including several Japanese and Koreans. When I inquired about the location of RG242.23 (Captured North Korean documents), which I plan to spend a lot of time looking at on future trips, I was told a Korean researcher had just been asking about the same files a little earlier.

Judging from the kinds of conversations I overheard, both in the reading rooms and during lunch in the cafe, most of the remaining researchers seemed split between professor types and people in the National Archives for whom research was definitely more of a hobby, or of a highly personal/family nature. They both seemed to share one characteristic: They took great pride in their knowledge and told each-other battle stories about their archival exploits in ways that differed little from the bragging heard upon return from a fishing excursion e.g., “Oh, you haven’t looked at RG330 yet? You should really take a look at RG330, why, just the other day…”

If many visitors are indeed doing research as a kind of hobby, not a few of them clearly in retirement, it is a great hobby to have. After my two days here, and I must sound very nerdy for saying this, it is easy to see how one could get hooked on doing research in a wonderful place like this. Which brings me to one of the biggest challenges I have faced not only here in the National Archives but in other archives I have visited: When you come across so much great material how do you keep yourself from reading it all as you come across it? How do you keep yourself from typing up notes or printing out expensive copies of the million distracting little “side-plots” and tangents that you find fascinating but which have little or nothing to do with your main research goal? At least half of each of the two days I spent here was spent reading documents which, though chronologically and/or thematically in the same ball park as my dissertation, required some incredible mental gymnastics to justify more than a momentary glance.

Usually, my mind proposed one of the three following arguments to justify my release of the little black button on the little microfilm controller that scrolled slowly through the documents on the machine I operated all day. It usually starts with 1) This document may contain one or two lines of information related to my research and thus I must at least skim it to confirm that there is nothing of value within. This then proceeds on to either 2) This document helps provide context or background for my research so that will have a better understanding of other things going on in the same time/place. Or my mind concludes 3) Wow, this is fascinating stuff, and may be of great use in a completely different research project that I may do at some point in the future.

This trip was my first so I decided to start with something easy: Decimal files of the department of state, mostly correspondence between the US military government or US embassy in Korea and the State Department from 1947-1949, in RG59. A lot of record group 59 documents are available in the Harvard-Yenching library up at Harvard in some collections of copies published in Korea so I focused on that which seemed to be missing from these published collections. I even had a list of some exact file numbers that I had seen cited which gave the US take on the various political developments and treason trials I’m interested in. They are also all on microfilm, so I spent most of my time in the microfilm room on the fourth floor.

I will move on to some more difficult Korean language material next longer trip during spring break which is not available on microfilm: captured North Korean documents. These may not be available at the College Park location but I’ll find out more about this when I prepare my next archival expedition.