The class visited the National Archives and Records Administration at 6125 Sand Point Way NE on Saturday, November 13. Our host was Carol Buswell, NARA’s Education Specialist. She began by showing Discovery Channel video “National Archives: Democracy Starts Here.”
NARA stores all documents produced by federal government district field offices from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Archives differ from libraries because libraries are selective (archives take everything) and materials are organized by subject (archives are organized by government office).
To locate materials, an archivist helps identify the appropriate office. Then researchers use "finding guides" that index the contents of boxes and folders with varying degrees of detail. They also indicate how many linear feet of shelf space they occupy. To understand how misleading the guides can be, we examined land allotment documents that contained a rich trove of personal history about a Native American farmer.
Access to ancestry.com is free at the NARA facility. To use the research room to examine documents, you can obtain a free research card with a photo ID.
We toured the building – a former airplane repair hangar for the Sand Point Naval base that was supplied by the railroad line now used as the Burke-Gilman trail. A NARA facility was used as the filming site for the final scene in the Indiana Jones movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark" showing the Ark of the Covenant being stored. That gives you an idea of what the inside of the Seattle building looks like.
We stepped into a room filled with rows of shelves stretched from wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor. The shelves are filled with boxes two rows deep. The air was cool but not musty smelling. After looking at some old ledgers, we moved from the public archives into the LARGER collection of materials that have not yet been cleared for public access.
From my own experience of archive research, I suggest doing secondary research in library periodicals and books, then identify specific source documents. That will focus your search in the archive. Browsing an archive is interesting but very time consuming.
Actually, it only LOOKS like the scene from the Raiders of the Lost Arc ... it wasn't actually filmed here. We really enjoyed your visit! What a great group.
ReplyDeleteKeeping everything is not only daunting for researchers but for archivists, too - not to mention we'd need a much, much bigger building. Actually, one of the most important things the National Archives does through its Records Management staff is determine what is kept permanently (or as they say, "until the end of the Republic") and what is only temporary (which can be as little as three months or as much as 75 or more years - if the end result is that it's destroyed, it's permanent). Only 1-3% of the records created by the Federal government are kept permanently. Since we only keep "the good stuff", it makes your job as researchers much easier.
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