n. (also National Archives Building)a United States agency edifice in Washington, DC, that headquarters the entity with responsibility for federal recordsNational Archives Act 1934The immediate custody and control of the National Archives Building and such other buildings, grounds, and equipment as may from time to time become a part of the National Archives Establishment (except as the same is vested by law in the Director of National Buildings, Parks, and Reservations) and their contents shall be vested in the Archivist of the United States.Arbaugh 1939, 106Motion-picture storage had to be planned to protect not only the films themselves from danger of loss by fire and deterioration, but also the National Archives Building and the other records to be stored in it.Grover 1951, 11We need no longer assume responsibility in the National Archives Building for records that are unscreened, too recent, too active, or of dubious enduring value.Bahmer 1955, 200We can no longer adhere to the objective originally announced, of concentrating in the National Archives Building all inactive archives of permanent or longtime administrative value or historical interest.Gustafson 1976, 275On June 10, 1937, Connor again had lunch with President Roosevelt at the White House, and the President again said that the Declaration and Constitution belonged in the National Archives Building.McCoy 1978, 31The considerable length of time allocated to construct the National Archives building, and the even longer time the job actually took, was attributable to the many purposes the structure was to fulfill.Gondos 1981, 174During the following week the small staff moved in and Archivist R. D. W. Connor declared the National Archives Building occupied as of November 8, 1935.Heaps 1998, 301OSS posed something of a mystery, despite the fact that it had R&A units working in the National Archives Building during the war.Cappon 2004, 122This period saw also the establishment of the first records centers by federal agencies, which, under pressure of expansion, resorted to semistorage in lieu of transfer of records to the National Archives Building, then reaching capacity.Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 40To see how solidly archival practice in the United States was oriented around custodial practices in the service of history and historians by the mid-1930s, one need only look at the façades of the grand neoclassical National Archives building in Washington, D.C.Trace 2020, 112Given that by 1946 the National Archives building was already three-quarters full, staff at the National Archives also turned their attention to internal records management issues.
