Remarks to Members of the Eighth Annual Institute on the Preservation and Administration of Archives.

I AM very glad to have you visit the White House. I am very much interested in what you are doing. In fact, I am highly interested in it because the papers of some of our Presidents of the United States, and of the 'Cabinet officers and of some of our departments, have been scattered from one end of ,the country to the other.

We finally did establish an Archives Building here, which works in cooperation with the Library of Congress, and I think we are on the way now to the proper preservation of the official papers of the Government of the United States.

And your organization has been very helpful in giving us the right sort of a start on that thing. I am personally interested because I want to see the state papers of President Roosevelt and myself properly cared for.

Princeton has had some experience in trying to assemble the official papers of Thomas Jefferson. They had to go from one end of the country to the other in order to get the fundamental documents that formed the policies of his administration. That shouldn't have to be done. They ought to be accessible in one place--the President's papers should be accessible where the scholars and archivists can get to them without difficulty. I hope we will have that in the future.

I am glad you are continuing your school. I hope you will continue to inform the people in Government on what they ought to do for the preservation of state papers. Just the other day, Mr. Leslie Biffle, in cleaning out an old dust-covered bookcase in the Senate Library, found some original documents signed by Washington and Jefferson and Polk, Madison, and Monroe. There was one there where Washington in his own handwriting was calling a special session of the United States Senate, he wanted to address a special session of the United States Senate. It's in the original form, and should never have been thrown around as that paper was.

There's a stack of those papers that high, and I am going to send them to the Library of Congress through Mr. Biffle and have them properly preserved. That is what in the past has happened to the official papers of Presidents of the United States, and it should not happen. You can help prevent it from happening.