Contrary to popular cultural depictions, the National Archives is a tremendous (and accessible) resource for anyone conducting research in a field involving the government. Whether your interest lays in Elvis or U.S. nuclear weapons policy, the Archives probably has a document (or several thousand) for you. Conducting research at the National Archives is also an important preliminary step if you are interested in obtaining documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR). You can save government time and your money by making sure that the documents you are seeking aren’t already available at the National Archives.
This is all well and good, but the vast array of documents, photographs, and audio/video records along with unfamiliar and seemingly arcane procedures and organizational systems can easily overwhelm even the hardiest researcher. Following in the footsteps of the FOIA Tips series, we hope to provide a guide to performing research at the National Archives. We can’t promise swift success, but we can provide some guidance and a few tips to make your research a bit easier.
