National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility

I have a researcher card, it's not an arduous process. The staff are very kind. When you show up to the National Archives in Washington, DC., prepare to encounter a general group of 2 dozen pros carrying scanners, laptops, etc. It's quite the experience.

I don't see this is that big of a deal. It's open, you can access it, but they are controlling more. Given the propensity for the theft and destruction of archives documents in the past, I'm ok with more security.

I want more lockdown of the original documents (put them in a cave somewhere), but more openness of digital scans.

Please just make a huge torrent and let everyone take a look.

Do they actually bring out unique archival records for the general public?

I thought it was always backed up stuff.

If not, even assuming a 0.1% rate of scroundels over time that must mean thousands of records have been destroyed or stolen or tampered with…

There are a significant number of digital scans available online. The problem is that they're only a tip of the iceberg of the available material, and digitizing records costs time and money (that apparently they don't have much of right now).

Can't speak for the US National Archives, but I do occasionally head to the National Archives of Australia to look at things that pique my interest, and I can confirm that yes, you can just ask for entire folders full of documents and in most cases, they'll take the originals and just plop them in a plastic tub for you to pick up and have a read through. It is a slightly strange feeling opening up a file and flicking through correspondence that was once personally handled by a Prime Minister from 100+ years ago. (They will use scanned copies for anything that either can't be handled for conservation reasons or has been redacted for security reasons.)

Yes, they 100% do bring out unique archival records for you to review. It's one of the neat things about going to the facility!

Sometimes if there's a more extensive process to retrieve the record (i.e. your archivist has to talk to a different government entity or agency to get the information) you might get some facsimiles, but often the information is only captured in the physical document that you're looking at. Moreover, to reiterate my point from above, part of the reason that College Park is making this decision (probably) is because it takes time and coordination to get these documents, and they want to ensure that--with limited staff and resources--they're still able to fulfill their mission of providing access to information.

Most of the records that exist under NARA's purview are not backed up at all. There's a major initiative to digitize existing holdings, but that's challenging/fraught with staffing issues. It's basically an under- or un-funded mandate.

If you're interested, there's been a fair amount of theft throughout the history of the agency, and they actually maintain a page on it: https://www.archives.gov/research/recover/notable-thefts.htm...

Or they plan to destroy more and not have people see them doing it.

Indeed, the archive has cavernous branches, in the literal sense you desire.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/spring/h...

The smart move is to downsize the reading rooms and use the money for a high speed scanning team.

The scanning should focus on volume not accuracy or quality. If anyone needed that sort of thing, they could always go back to the original documents.

So many digitisation projects spend half their time perfecting metadata etc - which IMO is of far lower value than just getting the paper scanned and sorting the rest later.