At @USNatArchives, we practice how to rescue records from emergencies.
The most common type of emergency is from water. A broken pipe, a surprise leak, or bad weather can bring water into your collection spaces.
Do you know what to do with wet records? #MayDayPrep 2/12
We practice salvage so that we get used to handling wet and dirty records. In this thread are some photos of a wet salvage workshop we held just a few years ago.
Some records can be wet for a day or so, but some, like coated papers and photographs, need immediate attention. They will stick together if not separated, so they get prioritized for action.
We soak the workshop materials in large containers.
Before draining the water and beginning to sort, we spend time reviewing emergency response activities; the rest of the afternoon is spent discussing and deploying different recovery techniques.
Theodore J. Green, Senator from Rhode Island and Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, handed over the documents to Brigadier General Stoyte Ross of the @usairforce.
Then the founding documents were loaded into a padded armored carrier protected by servicemen.
In 1846, 44 years after Alexander died, Eliza petitioned Congress for assistance in funding the publication of his writings—papers from the Revolution to formation and adoption of the Constitution to the administration of George Washington. go.usa.gov/xfgSh#HamiltonFilm
The report, which also reprints Eliza’s petition, recognizes her love for Alexander: #HamiltonFilm
“at such an advanced age, still cherishing an ardent attachment for the husband of her youth, wishes, before she too passes away, to see the reasons upon which his public actions were founded spread before the American people.” go.usa.gov/xfgSh#HamiltonFilm
Nearly 6,000 Confederate Slave Payroll records have been digitized for the first time by National Archives staff in a multiyear project that just concluded in January 2020. The entire collection can now be viewed online.
The Confederate Quartermaster Department created the payrolls for slave labor on Confederate military defenses. After the end of the #CivilWar, the Federal War Records Office arranged, indexed, and numbered the documents.
Before the documents could be scanned, the National Archives conservation team had to stabilize them. There were tears and breaks that could render some text illegible. For these records, that took over 3,000 hours.
As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration.
In an elevator lobby promotional display for our current exhibit on the 19th Amendment, we obscured some words on protest signs in a photo of the 2017 Women’s March.
This photo is not an archival record held by the @usnatarchives, but one we licensed to use as a promotional graphic. Nonetheless, we were wrong to alter the image.
On June 6, 1944, American, British, and Canadian forces stormed the 50-mile stretch of coastline in northwest France in the largest seaborne invasion in history. go.usa.gov/xme2s#DDay75
Over 150,000 troops, 7,000 ships, and over 13,000 aircraft were involved. Twenty-four thousand soldiers descended by air, the rest by sea. #DDay75
The massive armada included over 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight Allied countries. The troops were Americans, Britons, and Canadians, but members of the Free French and many other nations also participated. #DDay75