Handling congressional papers is no easy task. While presidential libraries maintain a relatively static collection, the Center for Legislative Archives’ holdings increase every time Congress passes a bill, discusses proposed legislation, confirms a presidential appointee, or does anything at all.
When the House closes its congressional sessions every two years, all the House's related documents—paper or otherwise—are organized, held on site for four years, and then shipped to the National Archives Building for storage.
The Senate delivers the boxes in accessions sporadically. "Accessions can vary from a box to 300 boxes" explains Matt Fulghum, the Center’s assistant director, adding that the Center receives "four or five hundred accessions in one year."
More than 13 million pages will arrive this year, says Richard Hunt, the Center's director. "From the 1980s up to the present, our holdings of House and Senate records have been doubling every 10 to 15 years," a nearly incomprehensible amount considering the Center currently has a half-billion documents to track, enough to circle the globe three times, if one laid the pages end-to-end.
As if organizing and storing these documents weren’t difficult enough, the Center's team has 24 hours to fill requests from committees. They made 187 of these loans—totaling more than 1 million pages—in fiscal year 2008 alone. And that’s not all.
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