Now go to the researcher locker room. Either take the non-security elevator down or take the long staircase down to the lower level. Straight ahead of you from the elevator doors, behind a partition wall, are the doors to the researcher locker room. If you took the stairs, you can go to these doors by turning right or go in the other doors by turning left.

Now put your things in a locker and get a cart for your electronic gear. This is when you find out if you remembered to bring a quarter. If you did not, you can sometimes find one in another locker door, if the prior occupant forgot to retrieve their quarter, or you can use the change machine in the cafeteria -- for which you have to go back upstairs. Put the quarter in, turn and remove the key, and take it with you. Put all non-essential stuff in the locker. You really do not want excess stuff in the reading room with you.

Now go through the internal security and up to the reading room. Roll your cart to the elevator and go back up to the first floor. The internal security is just to your left as you exit the elevator. If you are there before opening (which I always am, so as not to waste any time), there may be a line so that you will stand until the exact minute of opening. Have your laptop open and all of your papers ready for examination, and have your researcher card and equipment pass ready. The guard needs to see all of this and to verify that the serial numbers on the equipment match your equipment pass. Finally, you can go on to the elevators and up to the reading room on the second floor.

Check in at the desk in the reading room. Give them your researcher card. Show them your scanner and have them give you a lamp-sheet for your scanner, which you attach to the arm of the lamp at your space at your work table. (Scanner lamp-sheets are not used on Saturdays.) Make sure to give them back the sticker at the end of the day.

Now take your cart to a workspace, and then go over to the pull retrieval desk, which is halfway down the reading room, on the opposite side of the room from the main desk. Give them your researcher card, and tell them that you have requested a pre-pull, which should be available for you.

They will roll out a cart with your boxes on it and give you a large laminated place-holder card. Roll the cart back to your table. At last, you are ready to do some research.

Research Do's and Don'ts

It is extremely important that you do clean research and follow the rules. The rules are there to make sure that these records survive and that they are always in the same order and can be found in their proper place by later researchers. Yes, you will find things that seem to be out of order, but leave them in the order that you find them. Scan them, and you can then arrange your scans at home in whatever order you think it should be.

Before you scan anything, obtain a declassification sticker. Take the first box you are going to work on up to the main desk and show them the records and obtain a declassification sticker. You must then put that sticker on your scanner, so that it appears on every image that you take. And if you take photos, you must make sure that sticker appears in every photo. This is only true for records formally marked SECURE or RESTRICTED and now declassified. But that's probably going to be the majority of what you will copy. Be sure to return and sign back in your "declass" sticker at the end of the day.

Never work on more than one box at a time.
Never take more than one folder out of a box at a time.
Never handle more than one page at a time.
Never work with folders or pages in your lap.
Never put your own papers into or on top of record pages.
This is hard to get used to at first, but it is extremely important that you do this. It is all too easy to get things mixed up otherwise -- and put a page back in the wrong place or in the wrong folder -- or put a folder in the wrong box, so that some later researcher will follow the finding aids, only to find that what was supposed to be there is not there any more. The reason for keeping your papers out of the record pages is mostly acid content in your paper. The main desk has acid-free paper for taking notes or using as backing paper, and they also have long strips of acid free paper that can be used as place-holders within a folder.

The best way to work is to take a box off the cart and put it on the table. Then take the large place-holder laminated card that they gave you and place it in the box behind the folder that you want to look at. Then remove the folder from the box and lay it flat on the table. Open the folder. If there is a clip securing all pages, remove it. If you are at all uncertain how to remove it, replace the document in the folder, and take the entire folder to the main desk for them to remove it. When you work, leave the unsearched papers in a pile on the right, and take each sheet one at a time and scan it and then place it in a pile on the left, in the same order that you found it. When you have scanned all that you want from the folder, re-secure them with the clip, if there was one, close the folder, and put the folder back into the box in front of the laminated place-holder card. Then remove the folder that is just behind the place-holder card and process that folder. You have thus left the folder laying flat on the table the entire time it was open (other than a trip to the main desk), and you have never taken more than one page out of the folder and have always replaced that page in the exact same order that you found it. That's clean research. No matter how rushed you feel for time, do NOT violate these clean work habits or some later researcher may find the records in disarray or damaged or completely missing from where they are supposed to be.

Never carry a single document outside its folder, other than for immediate copying.
If you need to carry a document anywhere away from your work area, return it to the folder, and mark its place with a long acid-free place-holder strip (which are near the copy machines). Then close the folder and take the entire folder to carry where you are going.

Never remove staples from documents.
If a document is stapled, so that the staples obscure text or images or so that folding the pages back would damage them, then replace the document in the folder, using one of the Archives acid-free place-holder strips to keep the place of your document easily visible, and take the entire folder up to the main desk, and ask them to remove the staples. Once they have removed the staples, go to the little bins at either end of the main desk and take a small piece of acid-free paper and a paper clip. Fold the acid-free paper strip over the top of the group of pages that just had the staple removed, and then secure those pages together by putting the paper clip over the acid-free paper. Then put the document back into the folder in its proper place, close the folder, and take the folder back to your work area.

Never scan documents that are too large to fit on your scanner platten.
If a document, such as a map or an overlay, is too large to fit on your scanner platten, you can use your digital camera -- with the flash off to take pictures of it. If it is very large, you can ask the pull retrieval desk staff for permission to use one of the large tables in the glass-enclosed reserved rooms to lay the overlay out. You can obtain (from the main desk) white acid-free backing paper to put behind thin overlays, so that the marbling in the tables does not show up in your photos. When moving from the work space to a large table, make sure to replace the document in the folder and take the entire folder to the large table. Also remember to take the declassification sticker with you, so that it can appear in every photo. I take segment photos, which I can then stitch together with software at home.

Handle fragile documents with super-extreme care.
This is one of the VERY important reasons that you should plan enough days to be at the Archives, so that you will not feel the pressure to get too much done in too little time. This pressure is a great reason why people become careless and misfile documents or folders in the wrong place -- or even worse: they damage a document that can never be repaired or replaced because their lack of planning has become their excuse for why they are somehow too special to abide by the rules that everyone else abides by. In particular, large maps that have been folded for 60 years (a) do not unfold quickly without damaging them -- sometimes breaking them into pieces and (b) do not refold quickly once they have been unfolded. Great care must be taken with these folded papers -- which means accepting the fact that you must plan for the time to do this right.

Research Management

Use your spreadsheets. The spreadsheets that you created before you came are an integral part of your work at the Archives. When I start a new box, I always enter it into the Box-level Worksheet. And for each folder in the box, as I start to work with it, I make an entry into the Folder-level Worksheet. When I am done with a folder, I make sure to enter how many scans and photos that I made from that folder and to enter any comments or status updates that are relevant. When I have finished all the folders in a box, I total up the sum of all of the images of any type and enter that in the Box-Level Worksheet. When I have completed all the boxes for a particular research priority, I color that row gray in my research priority spreadsheet, making any comments or on-site status updates that are relevant. This is a critically important step. You do not want to get home and not be able to know what you did or did not pull or copy or at least look at while you were there.

Scan into the right computer folder with the right file names: For each Archives folder, I set my scanner parameters to name files with the box and folder number and a sequential number. Then I can just scan the documents of the folder in order, letting them go to the default computer folder for scanned images. After I have made the scans, I copy those files from the default computer folder over to the computer folder for that Archives folder nubmer within the computer folder for that Archives box. In this way, my files are easily retrievable when I get home, and each file's name also tells exactly what box and folder it was in at the Archives.

Do back-ups nightly. No matter how tired I am at the end of the day, when I get back to my room, the first thing that I do is to start backing up all the image files that I created or all the spreadsheet files that I updated that day. I came to the Archives to obtain these, and it would be a great loss to get home and find that somehow my only copy of them was corrupted. I use a 1 TB Toshiba portable external hard drive. This stuff is too important to lose it and waste all those hours of work and expenses of travel.

Requesting more pulls: On your first day, you need to not only start work on the boxes that you obtained in your pre-pull but also to spend some time with the research assistance staff (in the glassed in room at the west end, the end closest to the entry doors) and learn how to fill out pull forms and how to find out what records are available and how to know how to request those records. Once you do this, you can submit a second pull. They will hold two carts for you -- the one you are working on and one more -- so that another cart will be ready when you are done with the one you are working on and you do not lose time sitting waiting for a pull. It is also a good idea to take a few blank pull forms home with you and fill more of them in at home, so that you do not waste future research time filling them out when you are at the Archives. You can take the pull request forms through the internal security without having to have them stamped. I always scan my completed pull request forms, so that I have an exact record of every pull that I requested -- and so that I can see again later how to fill out a pull request form correctly.

Hold or reshelve? When the day ends and you have not finished your cart, you can ask them to hold it for you when you return your cart to the pull retrieval area. When you are completley finished with a cart, tell them that it can be reshelved, so that other researchers who are looking for the same boxes can find them. If you have another cart and you want to work on it for a while and then come back to the cart you are working on now, you must first return the cart that it is out now and have them hold it.