ing years of the National Archives. The situation required concentrating our meager forces largely on helping other agencies with their records problems and on getting records into the building. Consequently we fell behind with much of our other work.

Records must be properly labeled and packed before they can be used without damage to them and without too great expenditure of labor, and they must be stored in such a way that space is conserved. For space in the National Archives, like everywhere else, is a matter of concern. To reclaim every square foot of storage area possible, much shifting and consolidating of records, repacking of those received earlier, packing of those currently received, and double-shelving of the inexpensive cardboard boxes used as containers was done during the year. More than 230,000 cubic feet of records were so handled, and about 210,000 of the more than 700,000 boxes now in use were filled. In spite of these efforts, however, there was not sufficient labor to eliminate the backlog of unpacked records in the National Archives. In fact this backlog grew from 102,000 to 114,000 cubic feet of records. Late in the year a Packing and Shelving Unit to attack this problem was organized in the Office of the Director of Operations, and it made excellent headway, but the need for additional personnel, chiefly unskilled labor, remains.

As serious as the situation in regard to packing is, the necessity of giving more attention to the rehabilitation of records is even more acute. When early in the war the staff of the National Archives was drastically reduced the agency analyzed its work and decided what could be postponed with the least damage to the preservation and servicing of records in the building. One of the things that could be put off for a while was the repair of paper records. Formerly, as records were accessioned they were examined and those most in need of rehabilitation were treated promptly, but for the last 5 years it has been the policy, of necessity, to repair only the most valuable records and those likely to be needed at once for reference. As a result the volume of records needing repair has grown to the point where it is dangerous. Irreparable damage to priceless records will result unless a more adequate staff can be made available for repair work. Highly skilled, expensive labor is not needed in the main. The process of lamination, which is used to rehabilitate papers, has been broken down into simple steps so that anyone with a dextrous hand and a sense of responsibility can be taught to do the work.

An indication of the condition of records in the building is the fact that in the fiscal year 1945 only 17 percent of the papers that were flattened needed lamination while in the fiscal year 1946, 66 percent of them had to be laminated. The need for more extensive rehabilitation cut down the amount of material that could be treated. Only 69,000 sheets were flattened and 45,000 laminated in the fiscal year

1946 as compared with more than 400,000 sheets flattened and 74,000 sheets laminated in the previous year. There was little increase in the number of bound volumes that were repaired, about 1,750 as compared with 1,550.

New matte-finished plates, which when used with a waxing solution produce a dull finish on laminated documents, were perfected during the year. Records laminated by this process have no gloss and retain much of the texture and feel of the original paper. An improved method of laminating passenger lists, fastening them together, and covering them in one press operation was devised. This was largely responsible for the fact that twice as many lists were repaired as in the previous year, 2,100 as compared with 1,100.

Photographic records and sound recordings, of course, require special methods of storage and repair. In physical form they include nitrate and acetate films in rolls contained in cans, glass or acetate base disks and wire sound recordings, cut sheet film, photographic glass plates, microfilm, and paper prints. All such materials received during the year were packed and shelved, but the National Archives has insufficient equipment for the proper storage of such records. Nitrate film, which is unstable and explosive and gives off poisonous gas, cannot with safety be stored in the only kinds of vaults that were available during most of the year. In April 1946, 3 temporary filmstorage buildings, constructed by the Public Buildings Administration at Suitland, Md., were completed and 2 of them were made available to the National Archives. Each of these buildings contains a work room and 27 vaults, each of which has a capacity of about 1,000,000 running feet of motion-picture film, or more than 1,000 reels. By the end of the year, 29 of these vaults had been filled. Some film, however, still remained in the excessively damp vaults at Fort Hunt, Va.

Proper storage is only one aspect of the preservation of photographic records. A yearly inspection, which has not been possible since 1942, should be made of all films, dirty ones should be cleaned to prevent deterioration, and damaged ones should be duplicated. During the year under review, however, it was possible to reproduce less than 100 reels of film. The records on film produced during World War II alone cost millions of dollars. This valuable source of information should receive better care. The National Archives has the know-how, but it lacks the resources and some of the facilities needed to do the job.

ANALYSIS AND DESCRIPTION OF RECORDS

During its first 6 years, from 1934 to 1940, the National Archives was principally occupied with surveying the records of the United States Government and with transferring to the National Archives

Building the older part of the previous century and a half's accumulation of Federal records. At the same time it had to develop experimentally methods for controlling the mass of records being accessioned, for no other archival agency had ever had to deal with such quantities of records or with such diversified materials. Only on the eve of American entry into World War II were satisfactory plans completed for the internal management of the records in the custody of the Archivist. They provided for the identification and description in one or two page registration sheets of the record groups in the National Archives and for the preliminary identification and listing of the thousands of series of records in these record groups. Definitive inventories were to be prepared later and, as need for them arose, special finding aids, such as indexes and calendars.

These plans, however, were not realized during the war. The flood of records coming into the building, doubling within 2 years the holdings of the National Archives, the fourfold increase in the demand for reference service, the necessity that steps be taken to effect an orderly records retirement program for the Government as a whole, and a serious reduction in staff combined to squeeze out such deferrable though necessary work as records analysis and description. For 4 years it received only such odds and ends of attention as could be spared, with the result that there was built up a tremendous backlog of records for which not even preliminary checklists had been prepared by the National Archives.

At the beginning of the year under review there were 635,000 cubic feet of records, or about 90 percent of the holdings of the National Archives, for which preliminary checklists as planned in 1941 had not been compiled. This did not mean, of course, that the unlisted records could not be used. There were some indexes, registers, and other tools for the use of records that had been prepared in the agencies that created the files, and there were a number of finding aids of various kinds and of varying degrees of utility that had been prepared by the National Archives in the experimental period before 1941. Indeed one of the year's accomplishments of the analysis and description program was the compilation of a list of more than a thousand finding aids that had been prepared by these agencies or by the National Archives. To be able to provide prompt and economical reference service, however, the National Archives needs systematically to assemble and record information about all its holdings.

Excellent progress in this direction was made in the past year. For the first time in the history of the agency more records-over 90,000 cubic feet of them-were checklisted than were received during the year. This was nearly twice the quantity that it had been possible to checklist in the preceding 4 years. Since checklists are designed

to be used chiefly in the National Archives Building and to serve only until more complete descriptions can be compiled, they are not published. Most of the 57 prepared during the year were only typed but 20 were reproduced by photo-offset in order to obtain enough copies to meet the need for them by the staff and by other Government officials. Among the checklists processed were those describing records of the Office of the Secretary of War, 1800-1942; general records of the Department of the Navy, 1804-1944; the Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, 1775-1910; general records of the Department of Labor, 1907-42; and records of the Division of Insolvent National Banks of the Bureau of the Comptroller of the Currency, 1865-1945.

The reaction of interested persons to this program to make the records resources of the Government more available was expressed in a letter from a former judge, now president of the National Association of Broadcasters. In commenting on the Preliminary Checklist of the Records of the Attorney General's Committee on Crime, 1934– 38, a committee of which he had been a member, he said: "I am delighted to know that you have prepared this checklist and that you will have this material available for research purposes. My greatest fear at the time we closed up the work of the Advisory Committee was that all the fine material would be lost.”

In spite of the accelerated pace of the records description program, by the end of the year there was still a backlog of about 589,000 cubic feet of records in the building that had not been checklisted. Present plans call for the elimination of this backlog by 1950, but they depend on the availability of personnel. Although the emphasis during the year was on basic preliminary description, top-level control in the form of registration of record groups was also maintained. To the 215 record groups in the custody of the Archivist at the beginning of the fiscal year, 16 new groups were added. All these were described in registration sheets, and 118 previous registrations were revised to take into account changes in the groups resulting from accessioning and other activities.

A major accomplishment in the over-all control of the holdings of the National Archives was the completion of summary descriptions of all the record groups. Designed to provide a bird's-eye view of the records in the custody of the Archivist, these descriptions were published shortly after the end of the year in an 81-page booklet, Your Government's Records in the National Archives. Copy for another important reference tool for administrative and historical research, a comprehensive guide to replace the Guide to the Material in the National Archives published in 1940, was also nearly completed.

'Appendix VII contains a list of record groups as of October 31, 1946. 722191-47- -3

The quantity of records in the National Archives has about tripled since 1940, and an up-to-date guide has been much needed for several years.

A number of special finding aids needed to facilitate reference service were also prepared during the year. One such aid was an index to the abandoned military reservations file of the General Land Office. Another was a cross-sectional study of the materials in the National Archives of use in the statistical analysis of economic problems, which was published as a Reference Information Circular. Of even wider interest, especially to those engaged in postwar planning, was a preliminary list of some two thousand published and unpublished reports of the National Resources Planning Board on a wide variety of subjects, which was processed for limited distribution.

File microcopies.-One of the principal means by which the holdings of the National Archives that have the greatest importance for research are made available to scholars is through the sale of microfilm copies of them. The program to reproduce such bodies of records on microfilm was begun in 1940. It is in effect a sub-publication program, to which the analysis and arrangement of records and the preparation of title pages and short introductory notes are necessary preliminaries. Master negative microcopies are made of series of records in which there is general interest, and when orders are received for reproductions of these records positive prints are made from the negatives and are sold at cost. In the last 6 years, in spite of wartime shortages of materials and personnel, file microcopies of about 1,500 volumes of records and of a smaller quantity of unbound materials in the National Archives have been made on some 1,600 rolls. Nearly twice as many rolls were filmed in the fiscal year 1946 as in the preceding year, 316 as compared with 164, but this was far from enough to meet the demand for microcopies. A backlog of orders for 800 rolls was on hand at the close of the year.

Among the file microcopies completed during the year were despatches from United States ministers to Great Britain, 1842-70 (60 rolls), to France, 1826-57, 1865-69 (25 rolls), to the Italian States, 1832-60 (3 rolls), and to the Dominican Republic, 1883-92 (2 rolls); instructions from the Department of State to diplomatic representatives in various countries, 1801-1906 (126 rolls); records relating to the United States Military Academy, 1826-50 (16 rolls); records of the Southern Claims Commission, 1871-80 (13 rolls); correspondence, deeds, and contracts pertaining to lighthouses, 1798-1807 (4 rolls); and population schedules of the census of 1830 for Georgia (6 rolls), Illinois (4 rolls), Indiana (4 rolls), Kentucky (10 rolls), Louisiana (4 rolls), Maryland (3 rolls), North Carolina (8 rolls), South Carolina (5 rolls), Tennessee (9 rolls), and Virginia (13 rolls).