R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Last week, I was very rudely reprimanded by a NARA employee in the research room. I respect the fact that NARA has rules regarding the treatment of their records. Any institution, especially an institution the size of NARA, should have rules. I know that it is the staff’s responsibility to enforce these rules and I listen to them and respect them if I have been doing something wrong.
But honestly, I cannot deal when staff members are rude to me. Honestly, the way in which I was treated last week made me cry. I know that I’m quiet and that I look like I’m barely legal so I don’t command the respect of some of my peers. But I’ve been researching for years; the least I expect is professional behavior. I’ve been to many institutions that can’t afford to pay a single employee but manage to do a professional job. A salary is no excuse for impolite behavior.
I would just like to remind everyone that NARA is here because of researchers like me: researchers who need a large amount of records on a regular basis and who use these records for the promotion of the historical profession. If I didn’t have the need, NARA wouldn’t exist. You see, NARA wasn’t just started because the government needed to dump its records somewhere. The government formed NARA because researchers like J. Franklin Jameson needed a centralized repository for federal records.
If you’ve read any early works on American history, you know that they are rife with inaccuracies. This is often because in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries archival institutions did not exist in the United States. Historians simply did not have a place to go to find the records they needed. For government records, researchers would have to go to the specific agency where a document was created to obtain it. These different agencies did not give open access to their records. I have seen, multiple times, correspondence from the early twentieth century in files at NARA where clerks claimed they could not find the file a researcher was looking for. Clearly, the file existed because I found this correspondence within the requested file. The clerks just didn’t feel like trying to find it in the messy, dark storage rooms where the files were improperly kept. Clearly, this method didn’t work.
So as the historical profession grew, historians began to ask Congress to help them out. First, the Library of Congress got its act together. Then the idea of a national archive became popular. The idea of a national repository of government records wasn’t new. Pretty much all of Europe already had them. In the early nineteenth century lawmakers in the United States had thought about creating an archive, but it stalled. That is, until historians pushed for it. So in 1930 Congress finally passed a bill to create the federal repository and in 1934 it became its own independent agency.
Many early archivists had been historians. The first two Archivists of the United States, Robert D.W. Connor and Solon J. Buck, had both previously held historical positions. These two AOTUSes were instrumental in the formation and early development of NARA. Clearly, the agency would not have survived without those who needed to research inside it.
So remember, this agency (and all of the jobs it creates) would not exist without people like me!