Bonny, The rumor about John Carlin, U.S. Archivist wanting to close all the regional archives is absolutely not true. Please send it no further. Mr. Carlin has written guest editorials in the National Genealogical Society Newsletter, the Federation of Genealogical Societies, and the Genealogical Helper. Following in a complete quote from NGS Newsletter March/April 1997, Vol. 23, No. 2: "Ready Access to Essential Evidence: A Commitment to Genealogist and All Users of the National Archives and Records Administration "By John Carlin, Archivist of the United States. "I have received many letters from genealogist recently, and they all begin much like this one, 'It has come to my attention that plans are being made to close all our regional branches of the National Archives...' This is absolutely not true. The regional archives remain a vital part of the National Archives and Records Administration. " NARA is in the midst of making many immediate and long-term changes in the way it operates, and those changes may have led to some confusion about the status of the regional archives. I want to use this opportunity to explain the changes we are making and what they mean for genealogists in particular. Genealogists are one of our largest constituencies, so it is important to keep our lines of communication open. " When I became Archivist in June 1995, I inherited an agency in trouble. spiraling space costs, escalating record volume, increasing user demands, and rapidly accelerating technological changes threatened to overwhelm NARA and drastically impair the quality of services we could provide to the government and to the public. To address these problems, I led a Strategic Directions Initiative that resulted in a refocused mission and vision for NARA, and a new, long range Strategic Plan. "NARA's mission is to ensure, for the Citizen, and the Public Servant, for the President and the Congress and the Courts, ready access to essential evidence. Essential evidence documents your rights as American citizens, the actions of Federal officials, and our national experience. Part of our mission is to determine what evidence is essential and to ensure that government creates that evidence. In addition, we must make it easy for you to access essential evidence regardless of where it is, or where you are, for as long as needed. "These principles lie at the core of the new Strategic Plan I issued last summer. A complete copy of the plan is available on our website at <http://www.nara.gov/nara/vision/naraplan.html>. The plan was developed with input from NARA staff throughout the country as well as representatives from our external constituents, including several from the genealogical community. Because it is a strategic plan, we could not incorporate all the ideas and suggestions we heard, but we did take them into account and try to strike a balance between the needs of our users and the resources we have to meet those needs. "My first priority upon completing the plan was to reorganize NARA's office structure to improve services to federal agencies and the public and better coordinate internal operations and communications. As Part of this recent reorganization, regional archives and federal records center have been consolidated into regional centers. This will improve our efficiency and coordination to that NARA's limited resources can be allocated better to ensure essential evidence is identified, preserved, and readily accessible to more people, including genealogists. The combination of the regional archives and records centers is an administrative change that should be transparent to our public users, but it also may have given rise to the rumors about the abolishment of the regional archives. I can assure you the regional archives are not being abolished and are an important link in providing ready access to essential evidence. "I must stress, however, that for NARA to operate more cost-effectively, space costs must be reduced. One of the long-term strategies we are investigating is the possible consolidation or relocation of some of our regional archives in a smaller number of appropriate archival facilities operated by NARA. In addition to space costs, we will be looking at user needs in each region to determine how we can best tailor our services to meet those needs. Should consolidation of our archival records become necessary, we will ensure that our microfilm collections heavily used by genealogists remain accessible in the locations where the records are now. We plan to do that by developing partnerships with other institutions and expanding electronic access, but if we find no suitable alternative that meets the needs of our users, NARA will continue to administer those collections. "I am committed to our mission of ready access to essential evidence for genealogists and all researchers. We have to achieve that mission in the most cost-effective and efficient ways possible, but we also are dedicated to providing you, regardless of your location, with the best in customer service. I believe we can do both."