Exclusive: Seattle in line to get new National Archives facility
Oct 26, 2023, 8:32 AM | Updated: 12:33 pm
(Feliks Banel/KIRO Radio)
(Feliks Banel/KIRO Radio)
Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan, Ph.D., is in town and will give a free public talk Thursday at the Seattle Public Library about her role as leader of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a job she’s had for about six months.
Dr. Shogan sat down with KIRO Newsradio for a sneak preview of what she’ll talk about with Microsoft’s Brad Smith and revealed some so-far little reported news about the future of the National Archives in the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Shogan was sworn in in May of this year, so she’s fairly new to the job. She’s the first woman to serve as Archivist of the United States, and she is getting around the country to visit all 42 facilities managed by NARA, which includes a number of presidential libraries as well as regional facilities such as the one near Sand Point in Seattle.
The National Archives currently has 13.5 billion pages of “records” – including documents, photographs, and maps – and only about 250 million have been digitized so far. Digitization, says Dr. Shogan, is a big priority, as well as adapting to a world where nearly all newly created government records are “digital born” – that is, not printed out on paper.
NARA is also about to launch a new facility to speed up the digitization process across its nationwide network of facilities.
“We are in the process of standing up in the next couple of months a high-powered, high-speed digitization center in the basement of our large College Park facility,” in Maryland, Dr. Shogan said, “which will be a series of very big digitization machines that will be set up along with a whole staff who will work with those machines to be able to digitize large volumes of records” from facilities including Seattle.
The Seattle facility was threatened with closure – with the materials held there to be relocated to California and Missouri – in 2020. A lawsuit by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and a grassroots campaign by Indigenous tribes, historical societies, and others who wanted to keep the archives in Seattle ultimately led officials of the obscure Public Buildings Reform Board to scrap those closure plans.
KIRO Newsradio asked Dr. Shogan about Seattle’s long-term future as home to a National Archives facility, given that it was almost shut down and given the fact that NARA has stated that there’s roughly $80 million worth of deferred maintenance at the World War II-era Sand Point building, including a leaky roof and humidity control issues.
That was when Dr. Shogan shared some pretty big news, which came as a surprise.
“We’re moving forward with plans to build a new facility in the Seattle area for the National Archives,” Dr. Shogan said. “And there should be funding in the Fiscal Year 2024 appropriations legislation once it’s passed.”
“The full legislation has not been passed for Fiscal Year 2024,” Dr. Shogan cautioned. “But there should be funding to support the planning for a new facility, and the National Archives will work with GSA, who will help us select a site and make plans for a new building.”
GSA is the General Services Administration, the agency that owns the current facility in Seattle and will plan and develop the new one as long as the funding is there. Language in the GSA section of the Senate bill, dated July 13, 2023, reads, “Seattle, Design of Replacement Facility, $9,000,000.”
Planning for the new facility, says Dr. Shogan, will include opportunities for stakeholders to participate in envisioning a facility to serve the public better.
“I really want to reinvent and invigorate the public spaces,” Dr. Shogan said. The new facility needs to have “areas where we can have people to do research – we have to have good research facilities and research rooms – but also places where we could bring school groups […] where we can bring groups of teachers in from Seattle Public Schools, for example, on their in-service days, where they can come in and take a day-long seminar led by an archivist here.”
NARA is also seeking funding to do some repairs at Sand Point because it will likely take nearly a decade for the new facility to come online. The actual location is also still to be determined, but Dr. Shogan says it will be in the Seattle area.
Thursday’s public event with Dr. Colleen Shogan is at 5:15 p.m. at the downtown Seattle Public Library. Dr. Shogan will sit down for a conversation with Brad Smith of Microsoft about “what my plans are for the National Archives, what’s the role of the National Archives, [and] what are ways in which I think technology can help us accomplish our mission.”
The event is free, but you do have to register online in advance.
You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea, please email Feliks here.
