In 1971, the president of Mississippi State College, Dr. William L. Giles, invited President Richard Nixon to attend the dedication of U.S. Sen. John C. Stennis’ papers to the university library’s archives.
Nixon declined, however the Republican president despatched a beneficiant word in assist of the veteran Democrat Stennis.
“Future college students and students who research there’ll … familiarize themselves with the excellent document of a U.S. Senator whose … judgment in complicated areas of nationwide safety have been a supply of energy and luxury to those that have led this Nation and to all who’re involved in preserving the liberty we cherish.”
Nixon’s prediction got here true, maybe mockingly, contemplating the legal troubles over his personal papers in the course of the Watergate disaster. Congress handed the Presidential Records Act of 1978 after Nixon resigned.
Stennis’ present to his alma mater induced a windfall of subsequent congressional donations to what’s now the Mississippi Political Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries.
Now, 55 years later, Mississippi State College holds a physique of information from a bipartisan group of officers that has positioned it to inform a serious a part of the state’s story in nationwide and international politics. That story is advised to over 100 patrons and dozens of faculty and Ok-12 courses annually.
The papers are fertile floor for scholarly analysis into Congress’ function in shaping U.S. historical past, with its extraordinary powers over lawmaking, the financial system and one of many world’s largest militaries.
Mississippi State College, the place I work as an assistant professor and director of the Mississippi Political Collections, will not be alone in offering such a wealthy supply of historical past. It’s a part of a national network of universities that maintain and steward congressional papers.
However assist for this stewardship is in jeopardy. With the White Home’s proposed elimination of impartial granting companies such because the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, it’s unclear what cash might be accessible for this work sooner or later.
Mississippi State University
From analysis to public service
Mississippi State College’s constructing of an expansive political archive is neither distinctive nor a break from practices by our nationwide friends:
• The Richard Russell Library for Political Research and Studies at the University of Georgia – named after the U.S. senator from Georgia from 1933 to 1971 – has grown since its founding in 1974 into considered one of America’s premier analysis libraries of political historical past, with greater than 600 manuscript collections and an intensive oral historical past assortment.
• Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin donated his papers to Drake College to kind The Harkin Institute, which memorializes Harkin’s role as chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act by way of incapacity coverage analysis and training.
• Sens. Robert and Elizabeth Dole’s papers are the bedrock of the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University.
• In 2023, retiring Sens. Richard Shelby and Patrick Leahy donated their archives – Shelby to the University of Alabama and Leahy to the University of Vermont.
By lending their papers and relative political superstar, members of Congress have laid the groundwork for repositories like these to advertise coverage analysis to allow native and state governments to form laws on points central to their states.
Extra full historical past
When the repositories are at universities, additionally they present academic programming that encourages public service for the following generations.
At Mississippi State College, the John C. Stennis Institute for Government and Community Development sponsors a corporation that enables college students to find out about authorities, voting, organizing and potential careers on Capitol Hill with journeys to Washington, D.C.
Depositing congressional papers in states and districts, to be cared for by skilled archivists and librarians, extends the lifetime of the information and expands their utility.
When elected officers give their papers to their constituents, they guarantee the general public can see and use the papers. It is a manner of returning their historical past to them, whereas giving them the facility to assemble a extra full, impartial model of their political historical past. Whereas members of Congress usually are not required by regulation to donate their papers, they handed a bipartisan concurrent resolution in 2008 encouraging the apply.
Customers of congressional archives vary from historians to varsity college students, native investigative journalists, political memoirists and documentary filmmakers. Upfront of the 2020 election, we contributed historic supplies to CNN’s reporting on Joe Biden’s controversial relationship with the Southern bloc of segregationist senators in his early Senate years.

Carl Albert Center Congressional and Political Collections, University of Oklahoma
Preserving the archives
Whereas the outcomes contribute to the humanities, the method of archival preservation and administration is as complicated a science as another.
“Congressional information” is a broad time period that encompasses many codecs corresponding to letters, diaries, notes, assembly minutes, speech transcripts, guestbooks and schedules.
Additionally they embrace ephemera corresponding to marketing campaign bumper stickers, army medals and even ceremonial items of the unique U.S. Capitol flooring. They include uncommon images of every part from pure catastrophe harm to state dinners and legacy audiovisual supplies corresponding to 8 mm movie, cassette tapes and vinyl information. Members of Congress even have donated their libraries of lots of of books.
Archival preservation is a always evolving science. Solely within the mid-Twentieth century was the acid-free box developed to arrest the deterioration of paper information. After the arrival of film-based photographs, archivists later realized to maintain them away from mild and warmth, they usually noticed that audiovisual materials corresponding to 8mm tape decompose from acid decay rapidly if not saved in correct circumstances.
Alongside preservation work comes the duty of inventorying the information for public use. Archivists write discovering aids – itemized, searchable catalogs of the information – and create metadata, which describes gadgets when it comes to dimension, creation date and site.
Future congressional papers will embrace born-digital content material corresponding to e mail and social media. This implies conventional archiving will give method to digital preservation and information administration. Federal regulation mandates that digital records have alt-text and transcription, they usually want specialized expertise in file storage and information safety as a result of congressional papers typically include case information with delicate private information.
With congressional supplies typically clocking in at lots of or 1000’s of linear ft, emerging artificial intelligence and automation applied sciences will usher this area into a brand new period, with AI dashing metadata and cataloging work to ship usable information for researchers sooner than ever.
No extra funding?
All of this work takes cash; most of it takes workers time. Establishments meet these wants by way of federal grants – the very grants at risk from the Trump administration’s proposed elimination of the agencies that administer them.
For instance, West Virginia College has been awarded over $400,000 since 2021 from the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities for the American Congress Digital Archives Portal project, a web site that centralizes digitized congressional information on the college and a rising checklist of companions such because the College of Hawaii and the College of Oklahoma.
Previous federal grants have funded different congressional papers tasks, from fundamental provide wants corresponding to folders to extra complicated restore of movie and tape.
The Howard Baker Center for Public Policy on the College of Tennessee used Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities funds to purchase specialized supplies wanted to retailer the papers of its namesake, the Republican senator who additionally served as chief of workers to President Ronald Reagan.
Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities funds helped course of U.S. Rep. Pat Williams’ papers on the College of Montana, leading to a searchable discovering support for the 87 containers of information documenting the Montana Democrat’s 18 years in Congress.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt mentioned, “I’ve an unshaken conviction that democracy can by no means be undermined if we preserve our library sources and a nationwide intelligence able to using them.”
With the present menace to federal grants – and companies – that pay for the essential work of stewarding these congressional papers, it seems that these information of democracy could now not play their function in supporting that democracy.