a fund of $6,000 to reimburse us for the cost of rendering those services during the remainder of the fiscal year.

Another group on which there was a good deal of service consists of the population schedules for the censuses of the United States down to and including 1870. Those schedules are frequently consulted by people who want to prove that they were born, or what their ages are, or where they were born, and also by people who are interested in their ancestors-genealogists. They were being considerably consulted for such purposes before they were transferred to us.

We felt that that service was not the kind of a service that the Census Bureau was set up to perform, and the Census Bureau felt the same way about it, so we took those records and with them a very considerable service burden. There, again, however, the time required for those services is not very great.

Mr. FITZPATRICK. Do you give the information to the individuals, if you can?

Dr. BUCK. Yes; if they write in. If they are not in Washington, we give the information they ask for. If they are in Washington, we now require them to come to the search room and we make the documents available to them and let them search themselves, which saves time.

Mr. FITZPATRICK. These only go back to 1870?

Dr. BUCK. Yes'; 1870.

Mr. FITZPATRICK. Where are all the rest of the records of the Census; in the Bureau itself?

Dr. Buck. After 1870, yes. After 1870 they are not open to the public.

Mr. CHAIRMAN. I am glad to say that the requests for services have dropped during the last two quarters. You will see that this line [indicating on chart] came down in the first quarter of this fiscal year, and it has dropped still further to 69,000 in the second quarter of the present fiscal year. So we hope this burden will not be quite so heavy.

The total of requests for the first half of the present fiscal year is 148,000.

Leaving out of consideration those large numbers of routine requests, we have an increase of about 40,000 normal requests over the 87,000 of the fiscal year 1941.

That is the result of three things. In the first place, an increased quantity of records in the building. In the second place, an increased knowledge of the fact that those records are there, and that information can be obtained from them. And in the third place, an increased need for information from them, particularly by the war agencies of the government.

The greater proportion of our services are rendered to Government agencies. I would like to give you one or two examples of such services.

For instance, on February 13, 1942, an official in the Justice Department called the Division of Justice Department Archives at 4 p. m. and asked for all-night service on the Alien Property Custodian's records in our custody. He wanted to be able to consult them, or have his staff consult them, or use them, at any time during

the night in connection with some litigation before the Supreme Court that involved more than $2,000,000. Telephone connections were arranged; members of the staff remained on duty; and between 5:45 p. m. when the work got under way and by 9:30 p. m. 147 searches were made, and 136 files from those records were delivered by special messenger to the Justice Department which, fortunately, is next door. At 9:30 they decided to knock off for the night. The next morning, between 8:45 and 2:45 p. m.-and that was a Saturday-but our people stayed right there and worked in the afternoon (that was before we were open all Saturday afternoon ),—328 additional searches were made and 313 items delivered, a total of 449 items being supplied to the Justice Department. The officials concerned expressed their deep apprecriation of the excellent cooperation rendered by The National Archives.

Mr. FITZPATRICK. Did the employees receive any extra compensation for those long hours?

Dr. BUCK. None whatever. I have a statement here that I came across in the hearings on the price-control bill before the House Committee on Banking and Currency in August and September 1941. Mr. Leon Henderson was asked how his activity compared with the activities of the agencies of the first World War. In reply he said:

The similarities were very pronounced that that, of course, is no accident,

because I was familiar with the War Industry Board's activities * * * and

when I was appointed I had my staff go into the Archives and see how they had handled different situations and what was the reliance of the Price Fixing Committee for power for enforcement.

Mr. WOODRUM. Those old World War records, including the N. R. A. records, I imagine have been very active?

Dr. BUCK. They have, Mr. Chairman, been extremely active.

Recently the Tariff Commission sent two men over to The National Archives to see if we could supply them with any information about economic conditions in the Netherlands East Indies, and they expressed surprise at the amount of information available and at the efficiency of our service.

It seems to me this illustrates the importance of concentrating the noncurrent records of all the different agencies that are worthy of permanent preservation in one building, under one jurisdiction, so that each agency may have access to the records of other agencies insofar as they are not confidential in character and therefore restricted.

You might be interested to know that the Tolan committee has made use of records of the Shipping Board in connection with their studies.

One member of the House of Representatives called up one day at 4:10 p. m. and asked if we could locate a copy of an old report that had been made by a commission on the Alaska Indians. In 20 minutes he was informed that a copy of that report was available. He said he wanted a photostat of it, and at 9:30 the next day the photostat of that report was on his desk.

PROCESSING OF REPORTS-REFERENCE INFORMATION CIRCULARS

In view of the many requests we have received from other agencies for general statements about the information that might be obtained from records in our custody on special subjects or special parts of the world, we decided after we had prepared reports for them on such subjects, that perhaps those reports would be useful to other agencies of the Government working in related fields, and so we have processed a number of those reports in what we call our Reference Information Circulars.

The first one was on material in The National Archives relating to the Philippine Islands. There have been circulars on materials relating to parts of South America; French African possessions, Alaska, and on materials relating to labor problems and the like.

We have here a set of those and perhaps they might be passed around; some of you might like to see them.

Others that are in preparation now-and these all result from requests from agencies of the Government-describe in a general way the materials in The National Archives relating to transportation, to food production and distribution from 1917 to 1940, to women in industry in the first World War, and to the problems of small business. From now on, Mr. Chairman, in view of the reduction in funds that we suffered for the current fiscal year and the prospective greater reduction in the next fiscal year, we will probably find it necessary to ask the agencies of the Government that want us to make surveys and studies or compile reports from the records that would take considerable amounts of time, to provide reimbursement for those activities.

SERVICES TO PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS

Now I would like to mention two or three services to private individuals, and especially to people engaged in business.

A woman mining prospector had opened up one tunnel of an abandoned chrome mine out in the far West and was getting excellent results. She wanted to know about the prospects of the other tunnels. We supplied her with photostats of detailed information about that mine and the various tunnels together with photostats of maps from the records of the no-longer existent War Minerals Relief Commission. A representative of a manufacturers' association came to The National Archives to find out what happened in connection with his industry during the last war, and when he left, after studying records of the War Industries Board and other records, he said that the information he had assembled would save his industry 3 months' time in converting to a war basis.

Now, many people think the principal use of records in The National Archives is in connection with projects for historical research. Those records are used for such projects, though they have not been used as much for such purposes since the declaration of war.

To illustrate one such project, I might mention that the Secretary of the embassy of one of the South American republics came in and said that he wanted to do a piece of research on the diplomatic and commercial relations between the United States and his country. He

expressed surprise at the amount and the value of the material we had and at the readiness with which we were able to make it available to him.

Among books published recently for which use has been made of material, illustrations, records, and the like, now in The National Archives, are the recent books published by Carl Sandburg, George Fort Milton, and Margaret Leach-all three relating to the Civil War.

RESTRICTION ON SERVICES

Because of the rapid rise in requests from Government agencies and shortages of funds and personnel, we have had to put into force-we did this nearly a year ago-restrictions on the services that we will render, and to set up priorities. Our plan calls for giving first priority to any Government war-related service; second, to any other Government service that appears to be essential; third, to other Government services that are less important; fourth, to non-Government warrelated services; fifth, to requests that involve legal rights or interests of citizens; sixth, to significant research projects; and seventh, to all

others.

We have a good many statements from officials of war agencies that the services that we have been rendering have been helpful to them in the prosecution of the war.

REIMBURSEMENTS FOR SERVICES RENDERED

We have been rendering services in connection with the war that are not directly related to the records in our custody. We have on our staff certain people with unusual training and experience. We have in our building technical facilities, especially in the fields of motion pictures, microphotography, sound recording, and the like, and our facilities, our laboratories, and our staff of experts have been made available again and again to assist other Government agencies in specialized work.

The agencies to which we have rendered such services include the State, War and Navy Departments; the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; the Bureau of Economic Warfare; the Office of Strategic Services, and the like.

When these services do not take a great deal of time we render them as a courtesy to the agencies. In many cases it would cost more to make out the papers that would be necessary for a transfer of funds than the amount involved. But if any such services take a great deal of time we ask for reimbursement, and during the fiscal year 1942 we received about $1,650 as reimbursements for such services.

Since July 1, the number of them has very greatly increased and we estimate that we will receive about $5,000 reimbursement for such services during the present fiscal year, exclusive of an $8,000 working fund that the Navy has made available to us to draw upon for the construction of an optical printer for the printing of motion-picture films. We have made such an optical printer for our own use in the Division of Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings, and the Navy liked it and wanted one like it.

RECORDS TAKEN IN

Mr. Chairman, you asked about how many records we have taken in during the last year.

Mr. WOODRUM. And how near full the building is.

Dr. BUCK. I will try to answer both of the questions, Mr. Chairman. We took in about 160,000 cubic feet of records in fiscal year 1942, compared with 53,000 for the fiscal year 1941.

And we have taken in 56,000 cubic feet in the first half of 1943.

The capacity of the building is about 900,000 cubic feet of records. We now have a total of about 515,000 cubic feet of records in the building that are in the custody of the Archivist.

In addition there are about 45,000 cubic feet of records in the building in space that has been loaned to the War Department, the Navy Department, and other agencies, which leaves us space for about 340,000 cubic feet of records.

Now, taking all the records in the building, about 62 percent of the available space is occupied. Counting only those records that are in the custody of the Archivist-the others may be removed-about 57 percent of the space in the building is occupied.

Moreover, Mr. Chairman, we made a survey during the last year to see to what extent we had been able in 8 years of operation to get in the major bodies of old records of the Government. We found that we now have over 80 percent of all the records of the Federal Government in Washington more than 50 years old, exclusive of the records of the General Accounting Office, which are very extensive.

The only considerable bodies of records more than 50 years old not now in the building are those of the General Accounting Office, the Post Office Department, the Supreme Court, and House of Representatives, and some of the records of the Treasury Department.

In the early years there was no possibility of following a systematic plan of bringing in the older records because of the pressure of agencies to take more modern records.

We now have a rather systematic plan of accessioning. For instance, in the last year the Treasury Department decided to transfer to us, over a period of a year or two, all their noncurrent records prior to 1917 that are suited for permanent preservation.

Negotiations are now underway with the Post Office Department and with the General Accounting Office that we hope will lead to transferring some of their old and important documentary material. We found also as a result of the survey of what had been accomplished in accessioning that practically all the records of the administrative experience of the Government during the First World War, with the exception of those of the War Trade Board, are now in The National Archives.

We found that we have the major pictorial records of the wars of the country down to the present time: That is, of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the First World War.

POLICY OF SELECTION OF RECORDS FOR THE ARCHIVES

Our policy, Mr. Chairman, with reference to determining what records should be brought into the building, has been guided by