Office of the President records

The Office of the President records were reprocessed into their current arrangement and description in Fall 2016. This was largely an effort to consolidate item-level accessions into series, to bring all description online, and to provide better contextual background and description for the records.

The first efforts to organize these materials into a collection occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, as described in the following statement, written around 1981:

"Because of the way in which our archival collection was obtained, there are some problems in knowing where to look for particular materials. When the dept. was started in 1969, we had nothing in the way of file cabinet materials, altho some of them were in the library (in a vault) at the time. As material was received, we tried to put like materials together under the name of the issuing office. After the appointment of our curator in 1975, we began to set up an archival arrangement primarily by subject since at that time it was unlikely that we would ever obtain really official records of the University. Between 1976 and about 1978 many other materials were turned over to us by the University Historian. These arrived already set up under subject headings in two metal cabinets. The nature of their arrangement was, however, entirely different than ours and not at all consistent. We have since then been trying to absorb the collection into our library archival arrangement, setting up new finding aids when there were none. This work has been about 3/4 completed. At the same time, a great deal of archival material was sent to us by other offices, the largest amount being that from the President's Office. The Curator felt that we would be likely to get numerous calls from the President's Office for those items asking for them by the same subjects and names that they had assigned to them. Therefore, he thought it more expedient to retain the President's Archives intact in separate metal cabinets and to make finding aids corresponding exactly with the listing sent to us by that office. (See binder, "President's Archives.") The reason that those finding aids were combined with ours (even tho they were inconsistent with ours and housed in entirely different cabinets) was so that we could find them, as well as our own materials at the same time. In addition, we were able to add "SEE ALSO's" to existing cards should new items on the same subjects arrive. This should explain the inconsistency and confusion present in our finding aid file."

Although the materials transferred directly from the office of the president were rehoused in archival folders and boxes at some point in the 1980s or 1990s, each transfer continued to be understood, organized and accessed as an individual accession with its own finding aid. This practice continued through the 1990s, until by the end of the Trachtenberg era there were over 50 individual accessions attributed to the office of the president.

Around 2005, coinciding with the implementation of the library's first collection management software, all of the accessions from the office of the president were grouped together for the first time under a single collection, RG0002. However, the accessions were in fairly random order and no additional effort at arrangement or description was made at that time. This order was maintained through migrations into two additional collection management systems, and by 2016 RG0002 consisted of 53 or so series with minimal contextual or descriptive information, and over 300 boxes of unprocessed and largely unaccounted-for content.

The current round of processing was begun in an effort to improve understanding of and access to these materials. These activities consisted of identifying, arranging and re-numbering the boxes for entire series and subseries of records whenever possible. It also resulted in the removal of non-records materials to more appropriate collections, such as the university photographs collection, the university memorabilia collection, and the historical materials collection. One set of records related to the national celebration of the bicentennial of George Washington's birth was made into its own manuscript collection.

During the 2016 processing, the following accessions could not be located and were removed from the collection description: ACC#630 (Two copies of a Scottish Rite publication mentioning GW), ACC# 780 (one large ornament and stand with the lettering "SJT, 15th President").