As we have noted in our justification, we have received during the year the papers of President Wilson and Senator Borah. We have received also a number of other collections which for lack of processing assistance we have not been able to deal with. The fact that we have been unable to process very important papers is to my mind scandalous, not only so far as the duty of the Library is concerned, but also in view of our desire to secure new collections of papers.

Mr. O'NEAL. Speaking of President Wilson's papers and Senator Borah's papers, could you tell us how numerous they are and something as to what they will consist of?

THE BORAH PAPERS

Mr. MEARNS. Senator Borah's papers consisted of about 600,000 pieces.

Mr. O'NEAL. Largely correspondence?

Mr. CLAPP. Correspondence almost entirely.

Mr. MACLEISH. The Wilson papers are in a very large number of file cases. It is a very large part of the entire Wilson collection.

Mr. O'NEAL. What is in it?

Mr. MACLEISH. It covers the whole of President Wilson's life and fills some 1,240 manuscript boxes his life as a scholar, as university president, as Governor of New Jersey, and his 8 years as President. I think these papers represent all the papers examined by Ray Stannard Baker.

Mr. O'NEAL. They have not been cataloged, so you are not able to state how important it is from that standpoint?

Mr. MACLEISH. We have no means of knowing except by knowing the period covered.

Mr. O'NEAL. It was supposed to be the original collection of all of the Wilson papers during the period of the Presidency? Mr. MACLEISH. That is my understanding.

Mr. O'NEAL. And not anything prior to the Presidency?

Mr. MACLEISH. I believe we have pre-Presidential material.
Mr. O'NEAL. What would be the size of the collection?

Mr. MACLEISH. The equivalent of about 10 filing cabinets.
Mr. LEAVY. How did these papers come to you?

Mr. MACLEISH. By gift from Mrs. Wilson.

Mr. LEAVY. Do you have the papers of any other Presidents? Mr. MACLEISH. We have them of practically all the Presidents except Mr. Roosevelt.

CLASSIFICATION AND USE OF PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS

Mr. O'NEAL. You have them classified?

Mr. MACLEISH. We have.

Mr. O'NEAL. You have not the Adams collection?

Mr. MACLEISH. No; they are in Boston. We have not all of the Harding papers; we have some of them.

Mr. LEAVY. Of those papers that you do have, are they classified in the manner in which you propose to classify the Wilson and early papers?

Mr. MACLEISH. If you take the Washington papers, of which we have a tremendous collection, those are classified. As to whether we will be given any of these later collections depends on our ability to show how we can handle the collections we have.

Mr. LEAVY. Do you have the Lincoln papers?

Mr. MACLEISH. We have the Robert Todd Lincoln papers, which will be opened in 1947. We also have a considerable body of Lincoln material. The Robert Todd Lincoln collection is one of the great collections.

Mr. LEAVY. How are those collections made available to the general public?

Mr. MACLEISH. The Presidential papers, by and large, I think I am right in saying, are there without condition. That is, any member of the public who comes in and meets our requirements, which require him to identify himself, can examine the manuscripts, under proper observation. Many of our collections are accepted under conditions of one kind or another.

There is in the 1940 report of the Librarian, beginning on page 94, a list of the Presidential papers which we have.

Mr. LEAVY. Would it be more desirable to take the papers of men who have recently passed from the stage of action and classify them, and then go back and take care of these papers from earlier years? I understood your statement to be that they are not classified in many cases.

Mr. MACLEISH. That is correct.

Mr. LEAVY. I am wondering why you selected the more recent ones, to the exclusion of the earlier ones.

Mr. MACLEISH. I mentioned those because they are papers we received in the last year.

WORK TO BE ASSIGNED NEW EMPLOYEES REQUESTED

Mr. O'NEAL. What will these employees do?

Mr. MACLEISH. Their functions are described on page 20.

a cataloger-accessioner. He would do the processing work in connection with the preparation of manuscripts.

Another employee is a supervisor of the reading room, and his duties are what his name indicates. The purpose here is to free the specialists for their own work, instead of requiring them to supervise the reading room.

INCREASE IN WORK OF DIVISION

Mr. POWERS. Has there been a great increase in the work of the Manuscripts Division in the last couple of years?

Mr. MEARNS. I would say there had been an increase in the work of this division during the last 2 years.

Mr. POWERS. 10 percent?

Mr. MEARNS. I would hesitate to guess.

Mr. CLAPP. There have been no accurate records of the number of readers kept in the Manuscripts Division until during the past fall. We then began to keep records of the actual number of people who come in, of the number of those who come in to use the manuscripts, and after that, of how long they stay and how much they use. From now on we will be able to give you these figures for each year and to compare them with the figures for the previous year.

Mr. POWERS. You are doubling the number of your employees in 2 years?

Mr. MEARNS. The doubling is more apparent than real, because four of those persons last year had already been on the rolls for several

years.

Mr. O'NEAL. Is not the present purpose to give the students you have there a chance to do other kinds of work and let somebody else take care of the manuscript room?

Mr. MACLEISH. If I understand your question, these new positions will, of course, free the experts to do their own work.

Mr. O'NEAL. Is it not the purpose to have the students do file work rather than be actual custodians of that part of the building? Mr. MACLEISH. No, I do not think that is the purpose. The Manuscript Division receives the most difficult inquiries that come to the Library. They will be asked to answer questions, for instance, about Jefferson's correspondence. One question that came in recently had to do with the question of whether Jefferson had ever referred to a certain prominent figure at a given period. That involved 7 or 8 day's work of one of these people.

The Manuscript Division, I think performs a very useful service to university and college students throughout the country and the purpose is to leave its experts as free as possible to give their time to

the work.

Mr. O'NEAL. Are there not a great many questions that do not deserve an answer, that you really should not answer, and the answering of which is really supererogation? Would it not be possible to make a distinction between those and the ones that really deserve to be answered?

Mr. MACLEISH. We attempt to adhere to the following policy: When an inquiry is simply an ordinary inquiry which ought to be answered at the local library, we ask the inquirer to go to the local library. But where it is an inquiry which seems to be reasonable we answer it. I have been proceeding on the theory that Congress intended to make available to the people of the country not only this collection of books, but also the reference service which Congress set up originally for its own purposes.

PERSONNEL PAID FROM FUNDS OTHER THAN APPROPRIATIONS

Mr. POWERS. Do you think it might be wise to have a list inserted in the record of all people working in the Congressional Library who are not paid from this appropriation, the amount they are drawing, what they are doing, and where the money is coming from?

Mr. O'NEAL. I was going to ask Mr. MacLeish to furnish us with a statement of that kind. Most of those funds, I assume, have been gift funds, and I wish you would include in your statement any funds, other than appropriations that you may receive, with the number of people being paid from such funds and the number of employees receiving their entire salary therefrom, giving their rates of pay and stating where they are employed in the Library and those paid from appropriations, whose pay is supplemented from those funds.

Mr. MACLEISH. I will be glad to give you such a statement in the record. You will find on the sheets at the end of the justifications a full account of our gift funds, but they do not give you all of that information.

I will be glad to put such a statement in the record. (The statement above referred to is as follows:)

314295-41-3

Employees compensated wholly from nonappropriated funds, Apr. 15, 1941

780

Project F, development of

157, 880