David Ferriero on Digital Media And The Role of The National Archives Today

>> Good afternoon. Can you hear me, there in the back? Good. I am Jeffrey Horrell. I am the Dean of Libraries at Dartmouth and I'm very, very pleased to welcome all of you on behalf of the Friends of the Dartmouth College Library and our colleagues from the Howe Library here in Hanover, the Lebanon Public Libraries, the Norwich Public Library and the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock, Vermont. So I'm delighted that our cosponsors are all here and the librarians are right here in the front row. I, first, we'd like to acknowledge Richard Thorner, right here, Dartmouth class of 1986 who is the Chair of the Executive Committee of the Friends of the Dartmouth Library as well. In addition, this presentation is in part-- is part of the Leading Voices in Higher Education Series sponsored by Dartmouth Strategic Planning and this series is an opportunity to hear from distinguished leaders whose ideas and perspectives are helping us shape the conversation about Dartmouth's future. And in a moment, I expect that our provost, Carol Folt, will be appearing and she is soon to be the interim president of Dartmouth and Carol has many, many roles but Dartmouth strategic planning is one of her top priorities and so we are very pleased. I know she's coming from another meeting and she's probably running just a bit late but she should be here. Today's speaker, David Ferriero fits perfectly into this conversation by his leadership in research libraries and now as Archivist of the United States. Before being nominated by President Obama and subsequently confirmed by the United States Senate in 2009 for the post of archivist, David held a number of impressive positions. He served for 5 years as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries with responsibility for integrating its 4 research libraries and 87 branch libraries. These libraries comprise the largest public library systems in the United States and one of the largest research collections in the world. David, however, saw NYPL's developing digital strategy including partnerships with Google and Microsoft now resulting in a digital library with over three quarters of a million images available to the world. Earlier in his career, David held a number of increasingly responsible positions over 3 decades at MIT where he ultimately was the associate director for public services and acting co-director. He then became university librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University in 1996, a position he held for 8 years. In his role as Archivist of the United States, David oversees the preservation but equally, importantly the accessibility of the nation's most valuable documents including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When you fully understand the scope of responsibility of the Archivist and the National Archives, they are even more impressive. From maintaining the ratifications of the amendments to the constitution, all the original versions of statutes of the United States, joint resolutions overwritten by Congress following a veto, all of these come under the responsibility of the archives. And if those duties are not serious enough, the archivist oversees the custody of the electoral documents, Electoral College documents and we all know the implications of that. During his tenure to date, David has opened up the National Archives in exciting and creative ways and if you've not had an opportunity to look at his blog, you really should. It's extremely interesting and very engaging. And finally, in my career, it was the first time I have extended an invitation to a speaker and the individual needed to reschedule the date because of a meeting with White House Staff. It's not an excuse that many people can use but David did and we are very grateful that he's here. It gives me great pleasure to warmly welcome to the Dartmouth community, David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States and in that role, Collector in Chief. [ Applause ] >> Thank you, Jeff. It's nice to be back on campus. I've been-- I visited Dartmouth many times in the past. As you heard I was at MIT for many years and worked closely with Margaret Otto in my years there. And so I came here several times while Margaret was the director to talk to the staff and your own staff here at Dartmouth heavily influenced my building project at Duke University, John Crane who had managed the construction project, here the planning of the Berry Library. He was very helpful to me as I was putting together my plans for transforming the libraries at Duke. So there are great, great connections, personal connections for me at Dartmouth and in fact, I once tried to recruit Jeff to a position at MIT. He didn't take it. [Laughter] But I've never held it against him. So I thought I would do three things with you today. First, tell you a little bit about the National Archives since it's the best-kept secret. Sure. I don't-- is this working? Can you hear me? You can't. You can't even hear in the second row. Can you do something about the audio? Okay, better? >> Yes. >> Okay. I'm going to do three things. First, talk about the National Archives since most people have no idea what the National Archives is or what we do. Talk to you about some trends, issues, things that keep me up at night based on a series of questions Jeff gave me about the future of research institutions and then I'm going to wrap up with a virtual vault tour. I'm going to show you some of the treasures that are in the National Archives, some of my favorite, favorite documents. So the National Archives was created during the FDR administration which is late for a country to be getting into the business of getting serious about their records, since most European countries had formed their archives long before 1932. The doors of the National Archives opened in 1935. They were-- the building, John Pope Russell Building at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, exactly halfway, deliberately halfway between the White House and Capitol Hill was designed with a glorious interior courtyard and by the time Robert Connor, the very first Archivist of the United States had done his evaluation of the records in Washington, D.C., they discovered there wasn't enough room in that building to house the records. So they quickly redesigned the building and created a 21-storey tower where that glorious atrium was going to be. It is going to have a fountain and everything. So that was the beginning of the National Archives. We are now in 44 facilities around the country from Anchorage, Alaska to Atlanta, Georgia including 13 presidential libraries. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa through the George W. Bush Library in Dallas, Texas which opens in April of 2013. We have a collection that now is at about 12 billion pieces of paper. 12 billion. 12 billion translates into 1,440,000 trees. If you laid 12 billion pages end to end it would circle the earth 84 times. The work of the National Archives is governed by two sets of laws, the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act. The Federal Records Act has not been amended to recognize electronic records. So we are still, even though every agency is now creating electronic records and everyone of course is using email, we are still in a print-and-save mode, if you can believe it, in 2012. I am still bringing into my facilities 500 million pages a year. So we're working very closely with the Hill to create new legislation that changes-- revises the Federal Records Act to accommodate that. Presidential Records Act on the other hand in 1996 was amended to recognize electronic records. So when the Reagan Administration, from the Reagan White House, we have 8 million email messages, for instance. From the Clinton White House, we have 20 million and from the Bush, 43 library, we have 210 million email messages. And when I met with the president in Dallas to go over the plans for the library when I first started my job, he's very proud of the fact that his library is going to be the most electronic and he knows the number. He knows this 210 million and he leaned over at the desk and said to me, "And not one of them is mine." [Laughter] He's also very proud of that fact, too. [Laughs] It is going to be the most beautiful of all the presidential libraries. We have some wonderful presidential libraries but this is absolutely going to be the most stunning library because the First Lady, Laura Bush who is a librarian, was closely involved in the planning of this project and hired Robert Stern. Do you all know Robert Stern? He did the Berry, as the principal architect but at the same time hired the landscape architect to work closely with Robert Stern. So the interplay of interior and exterior spaces on this site on the SMU campus is just absolutely extraordinary. She has created gardens, six different climates actually, Texas climates on this 40-acre piece of land so it's a pretty special place. So because of the movement towards electronic records, as I said, Harry Higgins [phonetic], he is now creating electronic records and using electronic mail and all kinds of social media. The Archives, the National Archives has created something called the Electronic Records Archive and this is a project that was began in the year 2000 with a contractor, Lockheed Martin to create a facility that would ingest electronic records from all 275 agencies and the White House and Congress and store them in a way that they would be migrated over time as technology changes. That could identify attachments to email and ensure that they get migrated over time and is accessible to the public through an online catalogue, an open architecture portal to the records of the government. That was the mandate that was spelled out in this contract with Lockheed Martin. So that was, contract was signed in 2004. It took them 4 years to develop the contract. It was in development when I arrived in 2009. That's a long time for a technology project to be going on, so. That was the biggest issue that I addressed as I became the archivist was to wrap up the development and move on and we have done that. It is now, the project is now out of the development phase. The agencies are using it to schedule their records and to transfer the records to us. It is, I'll be the first one to say, it's a little clunky. So we are now in an operations and maintenance mode where we're working with the agencies to improve it so that it's much more user-friendly and most importantly, access to the records by the public is easier to accomplish. I'll say more about that later when I'm talking about the things that keep me up at night, okay? Because we have all the records of the government, we have assumed some additional responsibilities around the records. We have within the National Archives an office called the Information Security Oversight Office, ISOO, and this is the group that's responsible for working with the agencies around classification of records. It may shock you, I was going to say surprise, but it may shock you to learn that there are more than 2500 different classification guides in operation right now in your government, 2500 and that's down from 9700. And the goal of the ISOO office is to get it down even further. The Archivist of the United States would be very happy if we had one system. You know what it's like. It's impossible to manage 2500 different classification guides because of what's classified in one agency isn't classified in the other and it's, you know, inconsistency across the government. So that's one set of responsibilities. In the September before I arrived, the President-- the Congress issued a mandate to create the Office of the Government Information Service within the National Archives. This is-- This was seen by Congress as serving as the FOIA Ombudsman, Freedom of Information Act request the general public having a lot of trouble in getting their request paid attention to by agencies. This was an attempt to create an office where the general public could get some help from the government and interceding on their behalf with agencies who weren't responding to their request. So in the-- it took us about 6 months to set up the office. We now have 7 staffers, mostly the lawyers and a librarian in charge actually, a librarian lawyer in charge, I'm proud to say, and we have dealt with about a thousand requests now from the general public for help. The reason that the Congress is so serious about this is to speed up the process but also to eliminate as much litigation as possible because this Freedom of Information Act request often end up in litigation because users-- endusers get tired of waiting for responses. So of the thousand requests that we have done-- that we have handled so far, only 5 have gone to litigation. So we're making some progress but the task is enormous. The number of requests is enormous and it's compounded by this classification problem also which makes it more difficult. The third responsibility, because we have the records, has to do with an executive order that was delivered at the end of December 2009 which established the National Declassification Center. This is a mandate from the President to-- for the National Archives to review more than 400 million pages of classified documents, review for release to declassify, 400 million. Two criteria by which they could remain classified, weapons of mass destruction and national security. Those are the only 2 categories by which they could remain classified. It would be nice if the executive order gave me the authority to make the decision. It basically gives me the authority to get the agencies who have equities in those records to work together to review them to declassify. So we have reviewed now about 250 million pages of documents and of those that have gone through the full process, 91 percent have been released. So we're making some really good progress. I'm getting a little nervous because the executive order has a date by which this has to be accomplished, December 31, 2013, so this work has to be wrapped up rather rapidly. I'm proudest I think of the fact that the 6th oldest documents-- these are classified materials go back to World War I. The 6th oldest have been released. These are-- These were documents that the CIA classified. They had been FOIA'd to death over the years. People have been trying to get at them, the CIA refused to release them and in April, just before Leon Panetta moved on, he had a huge press conference and released the 6th oldest documents which are formulas for invisible ink. [Laughter] What he didn't say in that press conference was that the reason that he caved on these 6th documents is that my staff in the National Declassification Center discovered that they had actually been published in 1931. [Laughter] And guess how they found out? They used Google Books. Isn't that great? So I spent-- you know, I spent 5 years of my life at the New York Public Library working on Google Books. We were one of the original partners and it was so nice for my staff to come and tell me, we found these on Google Books. [Laughter] So that's I would say more about the National Archives as I go through some of the things that keep me up at night but that's kind of in broad strokes what the National Archives is all about. So things that keep me up at night. The National Archives is composed of at least 3-- I'll limit it to 3 different cultures. So one of the things I deal with everyday is getting librarians, archivists and museum professionals to work together and to think about the kind of work that they do and the similarities in their work rather than the differences. So for those of you who aren't in the trade, there's a fair amount of, I want to say tension, but difference in approach between librarians and archivists and in fact, when my nomination was announced, there's a woman named Harriet, who I'm still looking for on a blog post who made a comment-- an archivist blog post, he's only a librarian. [Laughter] So in my life now, in the National Archives, I have working with me, librarians, archivists and museum curators. We have each one of those presidential libraries is a museum and we have museum functions and exhibit functions in most of our facilities around the country. So I have been working diligently to kind of convince people that there are more similarities than there are differences. I have been working with the library school programs around the country. As I'm visiting my folks, I'm meeting with library school, students and faculty to talk to them about this issue of the 3 cultures in ways that the programs can be adapted to better educate all 3 so that they're focused on how-- the synergies among their life's work rather than differences. It's gaining some traction. The ALISE which is the American Library Information Science Educators group is now taking this up so I'm confident that we're going to make some progress there. I think we have something to learn from each other and we need to be less territorial about the work that we do. One of the problems I'm having has to do with the impact of technology on archival work especially. Archival processes and procedures were created mainly by the National Archives when the National Archives was created in the '30s and those processing techniques are still in place. And in order to be successful, you need to go through a gatekeeper, the individual who has the knowledge of how the records are organized. So in the Federal Government for instance, each-- all those agency records are arranged by record groups and if you know which record group your information is in, you can be very successful with the world of digital technology and instant gratification and people being able to find material on line, those old ways of organizing and providing access don't work anymore. So kind of rethinking how we organize to meet those kinds of needs is huge which is part of what I would call a users-- user-centered approach to the work that we do, putting the user in the center of the equation which for me in this current life but also in my previous lives in libraries wasn't always the way we looked at how we provide service. I was very lucky and one of the factors that contributed to my making the decision to leave the New York Public Library and go to Washington was the Open Government Directive which the President issued on his very first day in the office which was basically to create a level of transparency, participation and collaboration in government that had never existed before with the mandate for every agency to create an open government plan which would describe both internally how you're going to do your business differently along those 3 parameters but also with your costumers. How are you going to be transparent, how are you going to involve them in decision making to your costumers, and how are you going to collaborate with them? In fact, in his very first meeting with his senior staff on inauguration day, he said-- the President said, "Our commitment to openness means more than simply informing the American people about how decisions are made. It means recognizing that Government does not have all the answers, and that public officials need to draw on what citizens know. And that's why, as of today, I'm directing members of my administration to find new ways of tapping the knowledge and experience of ordinary Americans-scientists and civil leaders, educators and entrepreneurs-because the way to solve the problems of our time, as one nation, is by involving the American people in shaping the policies that affect their lives." So that was a wonderful mandate for a new archivist to come in and think about-- rethink an agency internally but also how we do our work with our customers and our customers are wide and varied, veterans, genealogists, scholars, researchers, K through 12 community, the general public, everyone. Some examples of how we have kind of turned things upside down, one example has-- is the Federal Register. How many of you used-- read the Federal Register everyday? It is the government's newspaper, right, and one of the reasons you don't read it everyday is that it's impossible to read. It's dense, boring and hard-to-find information that you're looking for. But if you haven't discovered it yet, please go online and look at Fed Register 2.0, just Google Federal Register and you will find the new web version of the Federal Register. Federal Register is published by National Archives, by the way, sorry. The new web version actually translates the Federal Register into English. [Laughter] It has wonderful photographs and graphics, most importantly it has big red buttons so that when you're-- when agencies are looking for public input on proposed legislation, you can actually understand what you're being asked to respond to and click a button and you can contribute. You can say what you think. So that's one example of how we're trying to involve the citizens in a more meaningful way in government. Another thing that I'm particularly proud of is something that we launched about 2 months ago called the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. I'm firmly convinced that-- and this is based on my experience in academic libraries that we have so much to learn from our users. Our users come in and use our collections and mine the collections and discover all these wonderful stuff and go off and write a book or journal article or use the information in some way and we don't know about it always. So ways that they can share with us what they're learning from the-- in my case, the records, so that the next time someone has a need, they'll be able to start a very different place. So the Citizen Archivist Dashboard is an attempt to get at some of that by providing a place where people who are using records in the National Archives can tell us what they've discovered, what they've learned. But it also is an opportunity for them to help us do our work. As I said, we have 12 billion pages, not every one of those pieces of paper has been described or organized in such a way that it makes it easy to use so we're trying to create ways for our user community to help us so there's a suite of about 5 different projects, 5 different things, you can get involved in if you're interested, to help us to describe the records of the government. One of them is transcription. I don't know if you know this, but they don't teach cursive in school anymore and most of my 12 billion pages are in cursive so we have mounted-- I think we have something like 5000 records up now where you can do transcriptions. You can help us transcribe records. We have 40 million photographs in the National Archives. We have not described every one of those 40 million, nor could we because we don't have all the information we need about who's in the picture so we have mounted a number of photographs for people to help us identify what is in the photograph and so. We have a group of volunteers called the civilian-- Civil War Conservation Corps. This is a group that's been working for about 15 years to help us digitize-- identify preservation problems and digitize Civil War pension files, another way of involving the public in our work. And one of the things that I'm proudest of is we're one of the 10 institutions in the world with a Wikipedian in residence. I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia. Now, you all probably have your own opinions about Wikipedia. I am a huge fan of Wikipedia. And we hosted the 10th birthday party of Wikipedia in Washington at the National Archives, and at that point, appointed our very first Wikipedian in residence who is a graduate student at Simmons and he has been doing incredible work teaching my staff about the power of Wikipedia. We do a thing-- let me give you just one example. We do a thing called Today's Document on our website. Everyday, you get a new document that we think is important for that particular day with a short description of what it is and we get about a thousand hits on that one page everyday. Dominic, our Wikipedian, took that photograph one day. It was the celebration of the Integration of the Marine Corps and mounted it on Wiki Common and we went from 1000 to 12 million hits on 1 day. Not only that, a group of Wikipedian editors were so interested in the photograph that it resulted in the creation of a new Wiki page on the Integration of the Marine Corps. So there's the-- Harnessing the power of the crowd I think is a huge part of what excites me about the work that I'm doing. And the latest thing that I have mixed emotions about because there's upsides and downsides, on April 2nd, we launched the 1940 Census, the first time in digital form, and it crashed. [Laughter] Picture this, I'm standing on the stage at the National Archives on the morning of April 2nd to do the very first search, me and the director of the census who's doing the second search, [laughter] and it crashed. Crashed because it-- genealogy, anyone who works with the public knows genealogy is huge. So we had-- We, in fact, were experiencing 100 million hits a day on that site which gives you some sense of just how powerful having digital access is. And you should understand that there's no name index. This-- In order to be successful in this thing, you have to know the street address, you have to know where people were living in order to be successful. We are now building that name index and we'll be live shortly but we're building it with volunteers. We have 250,000 volunteers working around the country, state by state, to build the name index for each state for the 1940 index. This is an incredible, incredible feat and a great example of the power of the crowd to involve them in the work that we're doing. So one of the questions that-- in terms of Jeff's questions around strategic planning and one of the issues I think that every university, especially with its strong undergraduate programs goes through but also relates to the work of the National Archives and has to do with the difference and quality of onsite versus online, is it possible to replicate the undergraduate experience for instance in an online environment? Is it possible to replicate the research experience in a research library or the National Archives in an online environment? And what are the differences between onsite and online? And I can talk out of both sides of my mouth on this one. As an old reference librarian, I'm firmly convinced that that reference interview, that personal interaction with an individual really makes a huge difference in the outcome. I remember when I was in the libraries at MIT, we did an information-seeking study and we measured-- I can still remember the forms that we had at the reference desk and in the upper right hand co-- left-hand corner, it started with the original question. And you-- and it-- the reference librarian had to capture steps that they went through to answer the question or help the user, and in the lower right hand corner was the actual question. And the difference between those 2 corners is something that I've always been curious about and worried about in an online environment because you don't get the same opportunity. So what are we missing there and how can we replicate it? So that's something that we're-- my folks are looking at. And my digital experience group is looking at that at the National Archives. Infrastructure investments, camp-- college-- university campuses are way ahead of the federal government in terms-- you may not realize this but you are, in terms of infrastructure investment, enterprise systems. The federal government now spends more than 80 billion dollars a year on technology, 80 billion dollars. And one of the real problems is that it's agency by agency and within agency is department by department, the way it used to be on campuses, it's not like that a whole lot anymore but the concept of enterprise systems across the federal government has not existed and it's new in the lives of the federal government, so finding ways to work across the agencies and that's part-- and once again, it's part of the open government directive, this collaboration across agencies and around-- especially around information technology investments is huge. And I'm-- I have a personal stake in this because there's something in the federal government called the CIO Council, the Chief Information Officers Council. These are the IT folks from all of the major agencies. And there's another group called the Records Managers Council and these are the people who are responsible for the records of the government. And these 2 groups have never met before. So when I arrived and started meeting with Vivek Kundra, who was at that point the CIO for the White House, the federal government CIO-- CTO. We discussed this problem and we co-chair the very first meeting of these 2 groups. It turned out to be a group about 300 people. And Vivek and I, when we walked in to the room, the dynamic was just wonderful because all the records managers were on one side of the room and all the IT folks were on the other side of the room and for some of the larger agencies, those people in the same agency had never met. So this is the first time that they met. And the-- you know, it's humorous but it's really very sad because what it means is that those systems people, the IT people are off creating new systems without thinking about the records implications of them and how are we going to retrofit these new systems. So the mandate now is-- that there's a records review of new systems as they're being developed, but more importantly, looking at government-wide solutions to the records management in problem, electronic records management. A yet another Executive Order-- no, this is a Presidential Memorandum coming from the president to each of the agencies, the first time the President-- this is the Presidential Memorandum on records management, the first time a President has gotten involved in records management since the term of the administration, and this mandate requires every agency to identify a senior officer responsible for records, not the records manager, a senior officer, to describe for the archivist of the United States obstacles to maintaining electronic records, and then for me to work with the Office of Management and Budget to deliver a directive to the agencies on what to do about their records. So we're getting serious around the records which is really exciting. I want to make sure I leave time for the best part which is the tour. So let me just say a few words-- finish on one thing that really keeps me up at night and that has to do with collection security. We spend all of our time, you know, making sure that our collections are accessible, that people are going to have access to them in perpetuity especially institutions like this one, Dartmouth, the National Archives. And we guard against theft and mutilation all the time and then we walk this fine line between protection and access. And yet, we're constantly discovering often after the fact that we have been betrayed sometimes by our own staff or by users who have insinuated themselves in to the lives of the staff and have gotten away with material. So I'm currently facing-- We just attended the sentencing of a 40-year staff member at the National Archives who was our film expert and had over the years stolen and sold on eBay about a thousand films from the National Archives. He was just sentenced to 18 months. So, the betrayal factor here, this is a guy who, you know, was well-respected by his colleagues and was captured, discovered through an individual citizen who had donated to the National Archives the set of films and discovered the films on eBay. That's how we caught him. The second one is a case that the perp is going to be sentenced in 2 weeks. His name is Barry Landau. This is a guy who has presented himself as a presidential scholar. He may even have spoken here at Dartmouth. He has worked his way through lots of collections-- historical society collections, public libraries, research libraries and was captured in New York, I believe, collection of about 10,000 documents, individual documents that are now at the National Archives because we've been working with the FBI on this case. So, when this goes public, there will be lots of institutions who don't even know that they're missing these things. We got involved because he was using the FDR library and had actually stolen 7 drafts of FDR speeches from the library at FDR in Hyde Park. This is a guy who the libraries knew very well, the staff knew very well. He was there a lot. He brought them cupcakes. We call him the cupcake thief in house. So, he had become trusted, just like the staff member who'd become trusted. So, keeping vigilant is the watchword and reminding ourselves all the time to be aware of what's going on. So, we've gone through massive retraining of staff, all kinds of technology solutions but also-- and educating the users. If they see things that look strange, that they should let us know what's going on also. So, those are some of the things that I worry about and keep me up at night. So, let me just do-- give you a quick tour of the National Archives, some of my favorite things. As I said, we have 44 facilities and I have so far been into 42 of them and that everyone I see just jaw-dropping things, things that you know from history happened but you don't associate documentation that actually proves it happened. So, I'm just going to quickly show you some of my favorite things. So, in the Civilian Personnel Records, anyone who ever worked in the federal government, we have a record. We have the record of that individual in our facility in St. Louis. So, this guy worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Civil War. You know who that is? >> Walter Whitman. >> Very good. So, he was applying for another job within the federal government and in his Civilian Personnel Record is this wonderful letter of 1863 describing Walt Whitman's wonderful traits as a wonderful person and blah, blah, blah, but can this guy work? We don't know. [Laughter] That's what I love about this. That's what I love about this record, signed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. [Laughter] Is that great? Also, in St. Louis, anyone who ever served in the military, we have the personnel records. The military records are housed in St. Louis, some 80 million records in St. Louis. This is-- I love this one. This is the military record of John Philip Sousa. Now, during this in the-- from the Marine Corps, 1868, during a period in our history, parents could basically sell their kids to the Marine Corps-- [Laughter] -- for-- they actually got money. They actually got money and then denture to the-- in the Marine Corps for a specified number of years. So, and this one was really funny because his parents agreed to have deducted from his monthly pay the sum of 2 dollars per month for being taught or instructed in the trade or mystery of a musician. [Laughter] Isn't that great? This is the discharge paper of Clark Gable signed by his personnel officer. Can you see who signed it? Ronald Reagan, Captain Ronald Reagan. [Laughter] This is Elvis Presley's induction record. Those are Elvis Presley's fingerprints. [Laughter] And that's his separation paper there. So in 1945, General Patton left Berlin with the Nuremberg Laws against Eisenhower's orders, brought them to Pasadena, California where his family was, deposited them with the Huntington Library and they stayed there since 1945. No one knew that they were there except the folks at the Huntington. They were not available for the Nuremberg Trials because they had been spirited away. In the 1990s and in 2009 when I was appointed, David Zeidberg is the Director of the Huntington called me and said, "I think I have something you need." [Laughter] And they presented us with the Nuremberg Laws. And these are the 3 laws which stripped Jews off all their rights, created the [inaudible] and forbade intermarrying the Jews and non-Jews. [ Pause ] Signed by Hitler, of course. So, Hitler also had garbles creating a-- basically a pick list from all of the private collections in museums in Europe of all the best artwork. Here's' a picture of Eisenhower. They discovered a lot of the work-- artworks in a cave but the garbles actually had photograph albums, more than a hundred photograph albums created as the pick list. And this is one of the albums which was recently found. Robert Edsel, who is the author of a book called, Monuments Men, has been collecting them and bringing them back to the National Archives. They're incredibly valuable to people who are trying to repatriate looted art. So, we now have something like 49 or 50 of them that are back at the National Archives. We have patents, wonderful patents and this is one of my favorites. [Laughter] So, this is a patent, who do you think this patent was issued to? Huh? [Inaudible Remark] Who said Michael Jackson? Very good. [Laughter] This is Michael Jackson's patent for this illusion-- antigravity method. It means we're creating antigravity illusion. We house all the treaties. And in the early days, this is what a treaty look like. This is a skippet. Take the cover off. They had the seal of the country, so this is the French copy. You take the skippet, if you take the cover off, there's a cord, this run around inside the skippet, [inaudible] cord into it, the cord goes up the-- around the entire binding of the document. So, you can tell whether it's been tampered with. So, the notion, signed, sealed and delivered, is that's-- where it comes from. So, this is the Louisiana Purchase signed by-- I can't read it very well. So, this is Bonaparte, a year before he became Napoleon Bonaparte. This is an Indian treaty between the United States and the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi. And the reason I want to show you this is attached to this treaty is a string of wampum. Have you ever seen wampum? Isn't that amazing? So some treasures from the Presidential Libraries. This is a letter from a kid in Havana, Cuba to President Roosevelt asking for a 10-dollar bill. He'd never seen an American 10-dollar bill, green. And if Roosevelt would send him the 10 dollars, he would show them where the ore deposits are in Havana so-- [Laughter] So that he could build his ships. Who do you think wrote this letter? Fidel Castro. [Laughter] Can you believe that? If only he had sent the 10-dollar bill. [Laughter] This is FDR's-- This is the draft of his Day of Infamy Speech with all of FDR's markings. This is the summer of 1959, Balmoral Castle, the Eisenhowers visiting the Queen. This is the next January, the letter to the president apologizing for taking so long to get back to him, signed Elizabeth and attached the real purpose of the letter was her recipe for scones-- [Laughter] -- which she actually made during that visit. [ Laughter ] December 21st, 1970, Elvis visited the President. The night before, he took the Red Eye from Los Angeles to Washington, he borrowed stationery from the airlines to write to the president on the plane, blah, blah, blah, blah, I want to get involved in your, you know, anti-drug campaign, you know, I want to come and visit, gets in a cab at the airport, goes to the White House gate, hands the gate-- the letter to security at the White House, can't do that anymore, that doesn't happen. And son of a gun, he gets invited because Bud Crow who was in the Nixon White House was a huge Elvis fan. He talked the president into letting Elvis visit. What Elvis really wanted, Elvis collected badges and he had a huge collection of badges, and what he wanted was an FBI badge. Hoover had refused to give him a badge. So at one point during that meeting in the oval office, Elvis says to the president, "Do you think I could get an FBI badge?" And the president was stunned. He's in-- you know, and he says to Bud Crow, "Can I do that?" [Laughter] Elvis left that room with an FBI badge. [Laughter] That was president. So when I became the archivist of the United States, when I met with the directors of the Presidential Libraries for the first time, they went around the room and introduced themselves. And Tom Putnam from the JFK reached into his briefcase and pulled out a letter that a kid wrote to JFK asking for information about the proposed Peace Corps. It's a letter from me. [Laughter] >> Wow. >> No, that's the one for the Peace Corps, 2 weeks later the Eisenhower called and said they found 2 letters from me to President Eisenhower, this is the first letter that I wrote, age 14. And then when I was at-- nope, then when I was at the LBJ [inaudible], yeah, I'm right. When I was at the LBJ, they handed me the copy of the letter that I wrote to LBJ congratulating him for signing the Civil Rights Act. [Laughter] So apparently-- and one of the Eisenhower letters they sent me a copy of the letter that Sherman Adams in the White House sent me, thanking me for my kind letter to the President and the pet elephant. So apparently, I sent something. [Laughter] And we-- you know, we collect artifacts, too. Those Presidential Libraries have lots of artifacts so I called the Eisenhower to say so, "Do you have my elephant?" [Laughter] And I was told that the president usually gave those kinds of gifts to his grandchildren. So about 2 months ago, David Eisenhower was at the National Archives and I told him the story. And I said, So David, do you have my elephant?" [Laughter] And he said, no, that his sister Suzanne probably did. So let me stop there because we're out of time, but I wanted at least to answer a couple of questions, okay? [ Applause ] But first, I have a question, is there anyone in the audience from Kendal at Hanover? Anyone who worked on this? If you haven't seen this wonderful book, it's terrific. Congratulations to them. Questions? Yes. [ Inaudible Remark ] >> We have-- that's a very good question. It's about accuracy. How can we guarantee accuracy based on volunteers? We have teams of people working and staff review. So an individual does a transcription for instance. It's reviewed-- Transcribed by another person and then the 2 are compared. And then staff does the final check. Yeah. It's intense. [Noise] >> It's a genealogy question. My father's career was always classified. I never knew what he did from World War II up to working for NSA, what are my chances of finding out what he did? >> Is he still alive? >> No, he's gone. >> You can-- Have you ever seen his service record? >> No. >> You can get a copy of his service record. So I would start with that and see what information you can find. [Inaudible Remark] Good luck. [Laughter] [Inaudible Remark] [Laughter] >> Questions. >> But I'd be happy-- you know, if you get stuck, I'd be happy to help you. >> Thanks. >> Question. >> Would you clarify the relationship between the National Archives and the Library of Congress? >> The most often asked question, most people think we are part of the Library of Congress-- >> Are you separate? >> Yeah. Well, most people don't know that so. We're responsible for the records of the government, anything that was created by a federal agency or the White House. The Library of Congress is-- doesn't have responsibility for records. They may have some early presidential stuff before the Presidential Records Act was created. >> Do you talk to one another? >> Oh, yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of friends at the Library of Congress including the librarian. And the other player in town is the Smithsonian. So, you know, we-- there are robust cooperative programs, especially around preservation, conservation, digitization, the 3 institutions. Yeah? >> What sort of cooperation you have with archival organizations in other countries? >> There's something called the International Council of Archivists and it's my peers from all over the world and we get together once a year, compare notes, work share, best practices, this Open Government Directive that I talked about. There's now an international open governmental plan that is co-chaired by the United States and Brazil [inaudible], all of those countries and 82 had signed on to it to the open record principles, so it's opportunities to get records much more prominently in the lines the governments around the world. Yes? >> I believe you said that the various agencies have the authority to sign off and sign on the release classified? >> Right. >> Could you discuss a little bit what sort of experience you have with that? Is it successful, are they-- >> It depends on the agency. >> Can you-- >> No. [ Laughter ] Peer pressure is wonderful, yes? >> I was wondering about your use of social media. I noticed quite a few Facebook pages. What else do you use and what seems to be working and what doesn't? >> So when I was at the [inaudible], we agreed on something about the digital experience group and hired this guy named Josh Greenberg [phonetic] who had [inaudible] that effort. And Josh taught me a whole lot about what research libraries have done wrong in creating digital libraries. We've done things the way we did, building physical libraries, expecting people to come and find those. That's not where people are. So we need to figure out where are the people and how do we get our content of where the people are. So using things like YouTube and Twitter and all those essential platforms to get our content out there rather than same people to find, but also knowing that the social media tools are a ways of connecting people with our [inaudible]. So using those to experiment with those and actually that was another thing, one of the [inaudible] asked [inaudible] culture of innovation and creativity and experimentation. It's not in these large kinds of cultural organizations that use a lot of control language in their vocabulary, be able to graphic control and circulation control and there's a lot of control language by freeing people up to think more creatively and innovatively about what they do and how they do it and the tools-- how the tools can be exploited to do their work. When I arrived at the National Archives, I discovered that there was a group of about 20 staffers meeting in secret who are really interested in social media but they hadn't been authorized to meet. So I discovered their schedule and walked in on one of their meetings and spent about an hour and half with them, talking about the ideas that they had and that-- they are the reason for all of the kinds of efforts that are going on now in the National Archives using social media 'Cause that's-- you know, that's the future. More importantly, all of the 275 agencies and the White House are using those tools. And if we're responsible for advising those people about the records implication, we better be using them and we better be out in front. Yeah? >> You mentioned talking about archivists sort of versus librarians-- >> Yeah. >> And as a young person about to pursue a career in kind of one side or the other, I wonder if you could speak to some of the challenges or any advice regarding which-- >> You're in a great position to make some demands about your program. So there isn't one side or the other that you get the best of both sides and I hope you go to a place that allows you that flexibility to put together your own program. [Inaudible Remark] That's where I went and I have their ear, so you will because successful. And then come and work at the National Archives, okay? [Laughter] Yes? [Inaudible Remark] I have lots of them. I have 44 facilities and I have 7, 8, 9, probably a dozen facilities with classified information. [Inaudible Remark] It's the same process. It-- We don't classify, so it's the agency that originally classified the material, has to declassify it. >> Do you get to keep the record? >> No, we haven't. We haven't. >> Even in classified? >> Yup, yup. There is still a lot of classified information out there in the agencies but the classified information that we have, we still need the authorization from the original agency. >> When you were working on Google Books, did you [inaudible]. >> It has to do with the Google Book project and did I anticipate the problems that it was going to have and what's my prediction about the future. So, the New York Public Library in New York City, the Center of Publishing, we only did public domain works. We weren't going to mess with copyrighted material. And I knew from the very beginning that that was going to be problematic. And I was more optimistic about the settlement than I guess I should have been. I'm hoping that the corpus of information that has been already digitized is made public through something called the Digital Public Library of America, there's some work going on, public-private partnership to first create a portal for all the digitized content around the country. There's massive amounts of material that's out there in silos basically, you know. There's no one place you can go to find everything that has been digitized. So, we're hoping to get the Google folks on board with that to contribute what has been done so far. I think it's a matter of time. I think it's very similar to what we went through with music. That it's just a matter of time before publishers get more comfortable with sharing content. >> Are you interested in offering from the public-- I mean are there documents that-- and how does one find out if there is. >> Unless it is a record, unless it's something that was created by a federal agency. As I said, I have 12 billion pieces of paper. We sometimes discover things that were once in the record and disappeared somehow. We're after right now a couple of pages that was sliced out of a ship's log, Civil War ship's log that described the visit of Abraham Lincoln to the ship and we know where they are and we're going after them, things like that. One more. [Inaudible Remark] Sure. Yeah, we have-- definitely, we have a lot of commercial partnerships because we're never going to be in a position to digitize everything that we have and my goal is to digitize as much as we can. So those partnerships with Ancestry for instance are very important to us. >> Please join me again in thanking-- [ Applause ]