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Old 10-06-2006, 03:33 PM   #1
Panzer_M
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Exclamation For those into History, news on the Nat. Archive.

From Harry Yeide, Author of The Tank Killers, The Longest Battle, Weapons of the Tankers, and other historical books(non-fiction) on World War II. I picked this up on Battlefront.com, and decided to help spread the message more.

[qoute]Few men have the opportunity to deny their fellows the fruits of history. Whoever set the library of Alexandria alight was one such. Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, is another.



Weinstein has eliminated, effective 2 October 2006, over three-quarters of the research hours at the U.S. National Archives that were available to Americans who work 9-to-5 jobs. Even for the privileged researchers who will be able to access records during Mr. Weinstein’s working hours, he has cut the amount of information made available by a third by slashing the number of “pulls” each business day. His decisions will drive many researchers and historians of our great country’s history out of business. This, in turn, will have ripple effects, as books and other publications that help spread knowledge of our history to the broader public will become less plentiful.



It is a shame that a petty bureaucrat whose name will justifiably be forgotten a century from now can do so much damage to American citizens seeking to preserve the memory of great Americans whose names should never be forgotten. Congress or the President should stop this travesty.



I urge visitors to this site to do three things:



Send Weinstein an e-mail and tell him what you think (allen.weinstein@nara.gov).


If you are an author, relate Weinstein’s attack on historians and the broader public in the foreword of your next book, as I shall. We can hope that when readers in the future pull our books from library shelves, they will spare an unkind thought for the man who did this.


3. Contact your representative and senators and tell them to fix this.[/qoute]

[qoute]The changes do not prevent people from looking at records, but they make it substantially more difficult. Total access time is cut by some 25 percent, and people who cannot go during the 9-to-5 period lose more like 80 percent of their access. Within the remaining access times during regular 9-to-5 hours, the "pull" times when you can request records are cut by a third, and the first one is pushed until 10 AM. What this means is that you can get substantially less material on a given day, and that by the time documents actually reach the reading room (which is likely to take longer because volume will be greater for each pull), a researcher will have a little better than 5 hours to work with the documents. Picture what losing 30 to 80 percent of access to the records is going to do to research, which means books on great WW II things like (salivate) tank destroyers, and tank battalions (ooh, ooh), and mechanized cavalry, and....

As to why it is not on the net, the NARA page simply announces the changes. Nobody is paying attention to the issue yet. [/qoute]

In layman's terms, Harry broke it down to this.

[qoute]What's gone away is three evenings 5PM to 9PM per week, and Saturday 9-to-5. Now there are two evenings and one Saturday one week per month, plus the reduced number of requests for material. As I recall from their public posting a while back, 17 percent of NARA's user traffic came in on Saturdays. [/qoute]

Somemore I gleamed from Battlefront.com during the topic.

[qoute]1) The basement of the Archives 1 building in downtown DC was flooded this summer during a massive rainstorm and the repair costs have broken the Archives budget.

2)Weinstein is a political hack who, despite his academic credentials as a historian, does not appear to believe in free, public access to historical records. For his most well-known book on Soviet espionage in America, Weinstein's publisher paid a group of retired KGB agents a substantial sum (supposedly $100K) for exclusive access to KGB archives. Other researchers have had their access restricted as a result. Weinstein has also refused to make available to researchers the tapes of interviews he conducted for an earlier book after the accuracy of his accounts of those interviews was challenged.

3) Weinstein's attitude regarding public access to information reflects the current administration's belief that the public has no right to know and that it knows best what information should be made public.

As Harry says, the recent announcement of the change in the Archives' operating hours is nothing short of a disaster for historians and anybody who cares about America's past.[/qoute]
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