Yet, you still cannot walk in and just look at their records. There are classified records there that you'll never see. And there are public records that you'll never live long enough to access because of their procedures.
It's not that I had some problem, as if I don't know how to use a library. It was the fact that almost everything I wanted to see was behind closed doors. I suppose you've never been to a single archive anywhere. You have to know what you want beforehand and tell one of their annointed ones to fetch it and bring it to you. You cannot browse to see what's there. It takes forever to get anything. I tried it once in Pennsylvania at the state archives. It took an hour to get an item that took me five minutes to look at. On my own, I could have looked at half a dozen different source records in that same hour.
The graduate library at UNC in Chapel was the exact opposite. You could look at government repositories of records from NASA, captured WWII German records, and more. You could just walk down the shelves and pull books off the shelf that were printed in the 1700s. In the NC state archives, you can just go through books and microfilms as you please. I've been there countless times.
BTW, I never said every scrap of information in the US is stored there. The building is not nearly large enough for that. There are national repositories at major university libraries around the country. I have personally been to two, at UNC in Chapel Hill, NC and ECU in Greenville, NC.
I am a professional researcher and have done research in countless locations. The National Archives is the hardest to do research in. NC county courthouses are the easiest. You can just walk in off the street and look at almost anything. I'll walk into one and, for instance, say "where are the death certificates," and they'll point in the right direction and say "have at it."
You seem to be lacking in information or willfully ignoring it.
Yet, you still cannot walk in and just look at their records. There are classified records there that you'll never see. And there are public records that you'll never live long enough to access because of their procedures.
It's not that I had some problem, as if I don't know how to use a library. It was the fact that almost everything I wanted to see was behind closed doors. I suppose you've never been to a single archive anywhere. You have to know what you want beforehand and tell one of their annointed ones to fetch it and bring it to you. You cannot browse to see what's there. It takes forever to get anything. I tried it once in Pennsylvania at the state archives. It took an hour to get an item that took me five minutes to look at. On my own, I could have looked at half a dozen different source records in that same hour.
The graduate library at UNC in Chapel was the exact opposite. You could look at government repositories of records from NASA, captured WWII German records, and more. You could just walk down the shelves and pull books off the shelf that were printed in the 1700s. In the NC state archives, you can just go through books and microfilms as you please. I've been there countless times.
You seemed to have missed the page about classified records. https://www.archives.gov/research/declassification.html
BTW, I never said every scrap of information in the US is stored there. The building is not nearly large enough for that. There are national repositories at major university libraries around the country. I have personally been to two, at UNC in Chapel Hill, NC and ECU in Greenville, NC.
I am a professional researcher and have done research in countless locations. The National Archives is the hardest to do research in. NC county courthouses are the easiest. You can just walk in off the street and look at almost anything. I'll walk into one and, for instance, say "where are the death certificates," and they'll point in the right direction and say "have at it."
You seem to be lacking in information or willfully ignoring it.