Record Statistical summary of accessions, fiscal year 1949-Continued 219 Records of the Court of Claims Section (Justice) 1 264 3 7 6 3 6 227 229 Records of the Office of Defense Transportation. 23 8 288 233 234 237 Records of the United States House of Representatives 1, 003 42 456 238 Records of the United States Counsel for the Prosecution of Records of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion 27 364 745 7 180 85 258 259 Records of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation 50 40 260 Records of the Office of Military Government for Germany 8 261 263 Records of Former Russian Agencies in North America 662 86 264 Records of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Maps and charts.-During the year the collection of maps and charts was increased by more than 50 percent; 263,000 maps and 4 atlases were received, bringing the total of such materials in the custody of the Archivist to 741,000 maps and 854 atlases. Of the maps, 505,000, or 68 percent, are manuscript or annotated. They constitute by far the largest body of maps of that character in the United States. A quarter of a million maps showing daily weather conditions in the United States for practically the entire period of systematic and country-wide observations, 1870-1943, were added to the collection. Other important additions include maps from the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the Soil Conservation Service illustrating various aspects of rural land utilization in the United States as a whole and in California and the West in particular; maps from the Petroleum Administration for War, 1935-46; and additional maps from the historically important "Fortifications File," 1792–1900, of the Office of the Chief of Engineers. Motion pictures.-Until adequate and expanded facilities are obtained for housing motion-picture film, accessioning of this kind of record, as of written records, must be curtailed. During the year the motion-picture collection was increased by only a few hundred reels. Exact measurement of film at the time of accessioning is, of course, not practical, but the estimated holdings of the National Archives now total well over 37,000,000 running feet. Among the films received were motion pictures showing the ceremonies and parade at the inauguration of Harry S. Truman as President on January 20, 1949, made by the Coast Guard, Signal Corps, Department of the Navy, and Department of the Air Force and a gift film on the same subjects from Movietone News, Inc. A small collection of film captured from the enemy in the European and Pacific areas during the recent war was received from the Department of the Army. Sound recordings.—Several significant groups of sound recordings were received during the year. From the State Department the National Archives accessioned recordings of information and propaganda broadcasts made during World War II in English, Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages, and scripts and memovox recordings of broadcasts made to foreign countries by the International Broadcasting Division of the Office of Information and Educational Exchange, Several hundred disks were received from the Department of the Interior, which record radio programs and speeches by officials of the Department, 1939-43, on such subjects as conservation, reclamation, and education. John Willoughby presented a recording of the speech broadcast by Winston Churchill at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 31, 1949. The sound-recording collection in the National Archives now totals about 300,000 disks. Still pictures.-Among the still-photographic items accessioned during the year were photographs, including photographic copies of drawings and paintings, collected by Dr. Leland O. Howard, former Chief of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, of American and foreign natural scientists of the period 1700-1936; World War I photographic records of the Army Air Forces; portraits of Air Force personnel, 1923-46; photographic prints, steel engravings, and lithographs acquired or made for exhibit purposes by the Department of State, including portraits of signers of the Declaration of Independence, Presidents and Vice Presidents of the United States, and cabinet officers; and photographic prints and negatives made by Robert Brewster Stanton and others in the course of a survey for the Denver, Colorado Canyon, and Pacific Railway Co., 1889-90, showing views of the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and adjacent territory. These and other accessions increased the still-picture collection by several hundred thousand items and brought its total to approximately 2,000,000 pieces. PRESERVATION OF RECORDS For several years past the preservation program of the National Archives, insofar as it relates to the physical preservation of records, has been limited to emergency activities. The fiscal year 1949 saw no change in this situation. Some 175,000 sheets were repaired during the year, 85,000 of which were laminated and 90,000 flattened, as compared with 98,000 sheets laminated and 104,000 flattened in 1948. Lamination is still the preferred method of rehabilitating paper records because of its adaptability, efficiency, and economy. Although many varieties of plastics have been examined and tested, cellulose acetate still remains the most satisfactory foil available. National Archives practices in lamination continue to be of interest to archivists and others both at home and abroad. Cuba and India now have the necessary equipment and trained personnel to laminate records in accordance with procedures developed by the National Archives. After research and experimentation in the rebinding of volumes the pages of which have been laminated, the National Archives instituted the use of inexpensive post binders during the year. This method of binding, which uses buckram or canvas covered binders in which the pages are held by means of semipermanent steel posts, replaces the conventional binding process. Titles and other identifying data are typed on strips of buckram, which are then glued to the covers to form backstrips. The finished binder costs about 30 percent as much as conventional permanent binding. It has the added advantage of being usable for loose papers that should be bound for protection but that may need subsequent rearrangement or the removal and reinsertion of pages. During the year, 2,596 bound volumes were repaired. Of these, 1,348 were sent to the Government Printing Office for rebinding; 991, less seriously damaged, were mended at the National Archives; and 257 were repaired by use of the new post binders. Records of the House of Representatives comprised 1,000 of the volumes sent to the Government Printing Office. By the close of the year more than 3,200 volumes of House records had been repaired. Research continued during the year on cardboard document containers clad with aluminum foil. Fire and service tests indicate that the containers are as fire-resistant as steel boxes and that problems of labeling and handling can be met satisfactorily. Specifications for manufacture were prepared, and during the coming year bids will be invited for the procurement of enough of these foil-clad containers to permit trial use in the records divisions. Experimentation has also been continued on the use of aluminum foil as a substitute for the usual steel plates in the lamination process. Results have been good and further tests will be conducted to find the optimum weight and temper of this foil. As in the past, the National Archives was called upon during the year for advice and assistance by both Federal agencies and others. Reimbursable lamination work was done for the Supreme Court on certain prize-court case records, the Patent Office on foreign patents, the Army Map Service, and the Department of the Interior. Cooperation with the American Heritage Foundation in insuring the preservation of the priceless documents displayed on the Freedom Train continued. Surveillance of the documents indicated that at times during the tour the humidity reached dangerous levels. At the suggestion of the National Archives portable dehumidifying units were placed in the exhibit cars. Their success in controlling the moisture content of the air indicates that they would be equally valuable in small records depositories where the installation of complete air-conditioning equipment is not feasible. When the tour of the Freedom Train ended in January 1949, the documents were placed in the National Archives Building until the extension of the tour or other exhibition of the documents could be decided upon. The Chief of the Preservation Services Branch was asked to serve as consultant to the New York State Freedom Train Commission, and from time to time he has been given leave for this purpose. Perhaps the most pressing problem of preservation is that presented by the nitrate motion-picture film collection of the National Archives. This problem is not confined to the National Archives; few agencies of the Federal Government have adequate facilities for housing cellulose-nitrate film, which is highly inflammable and which deteriorates rapidly under adverse conditions. Soon after the National Archives began operations it was realized that the facilities provided for this film in the National Archives Building were quite inadequate to take care of such Government records. As early as 1938 plans for motionpicture vaults were included in the Government's 10-year building program. The advent of World War II, however, caused this program to be set aside. As a temporary emergency measure in 1946, three cinder-block buildings were erected at Suitland, Md., to accommodate the film collection of the National Archives and some of the holdings of the Library of Congress, the Signal Corps of the United States Army, and the Department of Agriculture. The buildings were constructed as cheaply as possible and without any attempt to conform to minimum standards of the National Board of Fire Underwriters or other building codes. The vaults in these buildings are not safe depositories for the preservation of the Government's motion-picture archives. The inadequacies of the vaults were pointed up sharply by a series of fires in motion-picture storage vaults and warehouses in the New York City area during the hot days of June and July 1949. When a good deal of evidence was found to indicate that these fires were caused by spontaneous combustion of deteriorating film, a special emergency force was set up to examine the many thousands of reels in the Suitland vaults. Those that had deteriorated to an apparently dangerous point were removed from the collection. Losses such as these are regrettable, but until proper facilities for housing motion-picture film and adequate resources for its inspection and reproduction are provided the possibility of such losses is always imminent. ANALYSIS AND DESCRIPTION OF RECORDS The publication during the year of a new Guide to the Records in the National Archives 1 was hailed as "an event of major importance for scholarship" by the Library of Congress Information Bulletin and other publications. The 1948 Guide supersedes the 1940 Guide. More than 800,000 cubic feet of records, including some 500,000 maps, 250,000 sound recordings, 1,000,000 photographs, and 30,000,000 running feet of motion-picture film, are described in it. These holdings are equivalent in size, as the Information Bulletin points out, to a library of 20,000,000 volumes. The descriptions of the nearly 250 record groups, the units into which the holdings of the National Archives are divided for purposes of control and by which the entries in the Guide are arranged, are necessarily brief. To cover the whole range of the Government's documentation of its experience from 1789 to the present in anything but summary fashion would require volumes. Furthermore, a guide by its very nature is not a detailed inventory. This one is, as its name implies, simply a guide to the rich resources in the Nation's archives. Its publication, in spite of the complicating factors of war and readjustment, is a matter of pride to the National Archives. What must next be done is the completion of preliminary inventories for all the record groups in the National Archives. A quarterly publication, National Archives Accessions, briefly lists acquisitions by 'Government Printing Office, Washington, 1948. 684 p. $2.50. 861541-50 |