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123
Financial History Review 13.1 (2006), pp. 123–134. © European Association for Banking and Financial History e.V. 2006
Printed in the United Kingdom doi:10.1017/S0968565006000084
ARCHIVE SURVEY
Records of the Federal Reserve Board of
Governors in Record Group 82 at the
National Archives of the United States
GARY RICHARDSON1
University of California at Irvine
The archives of the Federal Reserve System are found in Record Group 82 at the
National Archives of the United States. This article describes the materials available
in that record group and ways to locate useful documents. Section i provides a brief
history of the Federal Reserve; it describes the organisation of the institution and
how it changed over time. The focus is on issues important for understanding the
types of documents that may or will not be found in the archives. Section ii describes
the process by which the documents were generated and preserved. Section iii
provides a broad overview of the categories of information available. Section iv
examines categories of particular interest in greater detail. Section v describes the
basics of doing research in the National Archives and the finding aids available to
researchers.
I
On 23 December 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act (38 Stat. 251). The
act established a Reserve Bank Organizing Committee, composed of the Secretary
1Gary Richardson regularly visits the National Archives of the United States conducting research on
American economic history. He has written a series of articles using data drawn from the archives of
the Federal Reserve System including ‘Bank distress during the Great Contraction, 1929 to 1933,
chronological patterns in evidence from the archives of the Board of Governors’; ‘Monetary inter-
vention mitigated banking panics during the Great Depression: quasi-experimental evidence from
the Federal Reserve District border in Mississippi, 1929 to 1933’ with William Troost; and ‘Deposit
insurance altered the composition of bank suspensions during the 1920s: evidence from the archives
of the Board of Governors’ with Ching-Yi Chung.
124 gary richardson
of the Treasury, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Comptroller of the Currency.
The committee was to designate no fewer than 8 and no more than 12 cities as
Federal Reserve cities, and was to divide the continental United States, excluding
Alaska, into regions known as Federal Reserve districts. The decisions of the
committee were subject to review by the Federal Reserve Board. The committee
also established regulations for the acceptance of the Federal Reserve Act by all
national banking associations and participating banks. After completing these tasks,
the committed discontinued operations in May 1914.
The Federal Reserve System initially consisted of a Federal Reserve Board with
its headquarters in Washington, DC; the Federal Advisory Council; 12 Reserve
banks and their branches located in major cities throughout the United States; all
nationally chartered banks, and any state chartered banks that had been admitted to
the membership. The system operated as a series of independent, interconnected
corporations. The major functions were to hold reserves of member banks, extend
credit on commercial paper, accommodate seasonal and cyclical needs for currency,
and act as a lender of last resort in times of crisis. The Federal Advisory Council
consisted of one representative from each Federal Reserve district, usually a leading
banker from the region, elected annually by the bank’s board of directors. The
council’s task was to serve as a channel of communication between the Federal
Reserve Board and the banking and business communities. The 12 Federal Reserve
banks acted as depositories for member bank reserves, monitored the behaviour of
member institutions, issued Federal Reserve notes, and acted as fiscal agents of the
Federal government.
From 1913 to 1933, the Federal Reserve System experimented with the tools of
monetary policy, as it struggled to learn how to mitigate the business cycle and
evolved methods for coordinating policies among the disputatious districts. A major
change in structure occurred in the wake of the financial and commercial collapse
during the Great Depression, which contemporary observers agreed the Fed did
little to halt. The Banking Act of 16 June 1933 (48 Stat. 168) established the Federal
Open Market Committee. The Banking Act of 1935 (49 Stat. 704) further reformed
the system.
The reforms centralised control in the hands of the Federal Reserve Board
(renamed the Board of Governors) and the Federal Open Market Committee. The
Board of Governors contained seven members appointed by the President and con-
firmed by the Senate. The board determined general monetary, credit and operating
policies for the system as a whole, and formulated rules and regulations necessary to
carry out the purposes of the Federal Reserve Act.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) consisted of the members of the
Board of Governors, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and
the chairmen of four other Federal Reserve Banks selected annually. The FOMC
directs the open-market operations of the system. These operations include the
purchase and sale of securities, bankers’ acceptances, and government debt. The
FOMC controls the principal tools of monetary policy, including the growth rate of
125federal reserve archive survey
the money supply, the discount rate and the Federal Funds rate. It directs the foreign
currency transactions of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Executive
Committee of the FOMC, which operated from 1933 until 1955, was composed of
five members of the FOMC, three from the Board of Governors and two from the
Federal Reserve Banks.
At the National Archives, Record Group 82 preserves historical documents from
the Federal Reserve System. The bulk of the collection consists of materials gener-
ated by the staff of the Board of Governors. A second major collection comes from
the Federal Open Market Committee. A third collection consists of the minutes of
the meetings of the Board of Governors. A fourth collection consists of the records
of the Federal Advisory Council. A fifth consists of documents generated by the
Federal Bank Organization Committee.
Record Group 82 does not contain materials from many portions of the Federal
Reserve System. From the Federal Reserve district banks, the only documents
which reside in the archives are (i) correspondence between the banks and the
board, for which the National Archives retain the board’s end of the interaction,
usually copies of letters sent to and originals of letters received from the Federal
Reserve banks; (ii) forms and reports completed during routine operations by the
Federal Reserve banks and submitted to the Division of Bank Operations and other
departments with the Board of Governors. The Federal Reserve district banks and
their branches neither fall under the laws requiring Federal Government entities to
preserve records nor under the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the districts
employ archivists and maintain archives. Others do not. None of their records reside
in the National Archives of the United States.
The personal papers of the early and influential leaders in the history of the
Federal Reserve also do not appear in the archives. The papers of several seminal
figures reside in the Library of Congress. The papers of others reside in special
collections departments of university libraries and in various presidential libraries.
Standard references to these collections are the works of Friedman and Schwartz and
of Meltzer.2
Related record groups contain materials that may interest scholars studying
the history of the Federal Reserve. Record Group 34 contains materials from the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Record Group 56 contains the General
Records of the Department of the Treasury, including correspondence files with or
about Federal Reserve banks and the Federal Reserve Board through 1932. Record
Group 101 contains materials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,
including reports of examinations made of examiners of national banks, all of which
were required to be members of the Federal Reserve System, and records relating to
the issue and redemption of Federal Reserve notes. Record Group 234 contains
materials from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
2M. Friedman and A. J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963).
A. H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, volume 1, 1913–1951 (Chicago, 2003).
126 gary richardson
Record Group 287, Publications of the United States Government, contains
copies of publications of the Federal Reserve System which were made available to
the public. Many of these publications also appear in Record Group 82, in particular
(i) publications that a staff member retained in his/her office for personal use, if on
retirement the materials left in his/her office were deemed worthy of preservation
as a unit; (ii) publications retained for in-house use by a division of the Board of
Governors, which often contain notes written in the margins by the staff; (iii) pre-
liminary versions of publications retained in the files of a division which prepared
the publication; these often contain corrections, clarifications and editorial marks;
and they occasionally differ from the final versions in content and conclusion; and
(iv) a section of the Central Subject File which retains copies of all publications for
the years 1913 to 1954. All the publications should also be available at the Library of
Congress.
II
Record Group 82 contains approximately 3,000 boxes of documents. The prepon-
derance are standard letter-sized boxes (12" ×5" ×10"). Fewer than 100 hold legal-
sized documents. Most (2,643) of the boxes come from the Central Subject File of
the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for the period 1913 to 1954. The Central
Subject File was maintained by the board’s administrative staff. It received copies
of all correspondence to and from the Board of Governors, all forms routinely
submitted to the board, and all memos and research reports written by the staff. It
also retained materials too voluminous to be held in the files of individual offices;
materials which departments no longer needed for immediate use but wished to
retain; and the office files of senior staff members who left the system.
The Central Subject File was organised according to an in-house decimal system.
The top tier of numbers ranged from 000 to 650. Ranges of numbers had the
following designations:
•000. Miscellaneous
•100. Federal Reserve System, 1913–54
•200. Federal Reserve Board, 1913–54
•300. Federal Reserve Banks, 1913–54
•400. Member Banks, 1916–54
•500. Economic Conditions, 1919–54
•600. Currency, 1920–54
The administrative staff routinely vetted the Central Subject File, discarding materi-
als deemed to have little value in order to free space for new arrivals. No information
about the vetting process survives. So, it is difficult to determine what materials
disappeared during the vetting process.
In September and November 1975, the Board of Governors transferred to the
National Archives the Central Subject File for the period 1913 to 1954. Materials
127federal reserve archive survey
pertaining to the period 1955 to 1975 should have been retained at the Board of
Governors and should not appear in the archives, although it is possible that
some documents slipped through the selection process. Materials which reached the
Central Subject File after 1975 have not been transferred to the archives.
The staff of the National Archives also periodically inspects its collections and, to
free scarce shelf space, discards materials deemed to have little value. I do not know
of any materials which the staff of the archives discarded from Record Group 82.
However, related record groups lost substantial quantities of priceless data during the
1990s. For example, from the records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the
National Archives discarded a depression-era survey of bank lending for agricultural
purposes, which contained detailed financial data on farm lending for almost every
institution in existence at the beginning of the depression. From the records of the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Archives discarded (i) a study
of deposit losses before suspensions, containing daily balance-sheet data for every
bank in the US which suspended operations for the three months preceding the
bank’s demise; and (ii) a punch-card database, containing balance-sheet data for
every bank in the United States (national, state and private) on 1 January of each year
from 1921 through 1934. The latter study was created between 1935 and 1941 by a
task force jointly managed by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and
funded by the Works Project Administration. These data sets had not been used for
more than 50 years, so the archives deemed them expendable. Hopefully, scholars
will use the records of the Federal Reserve frequently enough to preclude purges.
The other principal sections of Record Group 82 – records of the Federal Open
Market Committee, records of the Federal Advisory Council, records of the Federal
Bank Organization Committee, minutes of the Board of Governors, and the
International Subject File – appear to have reached the archives through a process
similar to that of the Central Subject File. At the archives these groups appear
to have undergone neither reorganisation nor vetting with the exception of the
International Subject File, which the archives reboxed in recent years.
III
Record Group 82 contains a wealth of information about the Federal Reserve
System. The records which scholars have used most frequently are those related to
the Federal Open Market Committee.3 The National Archives possesses a complete
3C. D. Romer and D. H. Romer, ‘Does monetary policy matter? A new test in the spirit of Friedman
and Schwartz’, in Olivier Blanchard and Stanley Fischer (eds.), NBER Macroeconomics Annual
(Cambridge, MA, 1989). J. Boschen and L. Mills, ‘The effects of countercyclical policy on money
and interest rates: an evaluation of evidence from FOMC documents’, Working Paper 91-20,
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 1991.
128 gary richardson
series of the minutes of the FOMC from March 1936 through 1996. New additions
periodically extend the latest date. The archives also possesses a complete series of
the minutes of the FOMC’s Executive Committee from March 1936 through June
1955.
Accessing these records is straightforward. The collection is arranged chronologi-
cally and is available on microfilm.4 The microfilms may be purchased from the
archives, and since several university libraries possess copies, they should be available
via interlibrary loan. The microfilm is kept current as new accessions are received.
There is only one restriction placed on access to the FOMC’s minutes. No one may
have access to, or information from any file from the period 1933 to 1954 containing
restricted information on government security dealers, except with written
authorisation of the Secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee. Note that
minutes dated earlier than March 1936 are found among the Central Subject Files of
the Board of Governors under file designation 333.3.
Stored with the records of the FOMC are those of its predecessors, the Open
Market Investment Committee (OMIC), of 1922 to 1930, and the Open Market
Policy Conference (OPMC), of 1930 to 1933. The records of these predecessors
span 82 boxes and 30 linear feet of shelf space, which is slightly larger than
the dimensions of the records of the FOMC itself. The collections are arranged
alphabetically by subject. The collection includes correspondence, memoranda
and reports relating to the operation of the OMIC and the OMPC, as well as
background information on the committee’s deliberations such as assessments of
conditions in money and credit markets and trends in business and banking. The
collection also contains the weekly reports of the staff of the OMIC and OMPC.
A few restricted items, which contain privileged information on securities dealers,
have been segregated into envelopes behind the files from which they were
withdrawn.
The records of the Federal Advisory Council take up less shelf space than those of
the FOMC. Two bound volumes (1914–40, 1941–5) contain a subject index to the
council’s minutes and recommendations. Cross-references are provided to the dates
of meetings. Ten bound volumes contain minutes of the meetings and copies of the
council’s recommendations to the Board of Governors. The collection is arranged
chronologically. Six boxes contain original letters received and copies of letters sent
concerning the council’s advisory role. Most of the letters are between council
members, the council president and the Board of Governors.
The records of the Reserve Bank Organization Committee span 40 boxes and 20
feet of shelf space. The records are arranged haphazardly. Some are sorted by Federal
Reserve district. Others are ‘unarranged’, as the archives shelf list describes the
situation. About one-third of the materials consist of correspondence, petitions,
briefs and maps submitted to the committee at hearings held to determine the
4National Archives and Records Administration, Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee, 1936 on
and of its Executive Committee, 1936 to 1955 (M591).
129federal reserve archive survey
boundaries of the Federal Reserve districts or to select reserve and central reserve
cities. Additional records relate to the organisation of the Federal Reserve banks
and the initial election of Federal Reserve district directors. Another third of the
materials consists of appeals, petitions, and briefs submitted to the Federal Reserve
Board in reaction to the decisions of the Reserve Bank Organization Committee’s
decisions. The appeals try to convince the board to reject the recommendations,
reallocate designations of reserve cities, and redraw district boundaries. The final
third of the materials consists of capital stock application forms submitted to the
Organization Committee by national banks required to become members of the
Federal Reserve System and state banks wishing to become members. The applica-
tions are arranged numerically by Federal Reserve district, then alphabetically by
state, and alphabetically by name of bank.
The minutes of the meetings of the Board of Governors and its predecessor, the
Federal Reserve Board, consist of 53 volumes covering the years 1914 through 1966.
The collection is arranged chronologically. Each volume contains minutes from all
meetings in a single year. An index covers the years 1934 to 1951 and 1962 to 1965.
The volume numbers on the index coincide with the volume numbers on the
minutes (i.e. the minutes for 1934 appear in Volume 21 of the minutes’ series and
the index for 1934 appears in Volume 21 of the index series). The correspondence of
the volume numbers suggests that indices once existed for all of the minutes, but the
missing volumes, for some reason, missed transference to the National Archives.
The minutes of the Board of Governors may be accessed openly with several
exceptions. Records containing (a) information regarding the removal of individual
bank directors from office; (b) individual salaries; (c) legal violations, such as short-
ages, missing securities, etc., with names of individual banks and employees; (d) the
security of the Board building and Reserve bank buildings; and (e) a report of
examination of the Pennsylvania Department of Banking (found in file 412.101) are
accessible only upon authorisation of the Board or the Secretary of the Board.
Records containing information relating to individuals, including salaries, grades
and personnel problems, are accessible only after the record has been in existence
50 years or upon earlier authorisation of the Board or the Secretary of the Board.
The same restrictions apply to all other records of the Federal Reserve System held
at the National Archives.
The International Subject Files of the Division of International Finance appear in
323 boxes spanning nearly 150 linear feet of shelf space. The finding guides differ on
the dates of the material contained in the collection. One says 1907 to 1974. Another
says 1878 to 1980. A third says 1922 to 1966. A fourth says 1935 to 1955. The
instructions for the transfer of these documents indicate that all of the folders should
contain no material dated later than December 1974. Such material was removed
and integrated into files retained by the Board of Governors. My investigation
indicates that most of the materials come from the 1920s through the 1970s, with
some earlier documents inherited from predecessor organisations included in certain
containers and some recent documents accidentally left in the collection when it was
130 gary richardson
transferred to the archives in June 1990. The preponderance of the documents relate
to the international economy and relations between nations during the decades
preceding and following World War II.
The Central Subject File for the years 1913 to 1954 consists of 2,643 boxes
spanning 1,152 linear feet of shelf space. The records cover a vast array of subjects
organised according to the decimal system described earlier. Table 1 provides a brief
overview of the collection.
Table 1 begins by partitioning the principal categories of the Central Subject
File at the two-digit level. Then it lists the numbers of the boxes associated with
each category. The number of boxes varies across categories. The upper bound
approaches 500. The lower bound approaches 1. The reason for the difference is
unclear. Different categories probably accumulated different quantities of records
during the routine course of operations. Some categories may also have been vetted
more thoroughly than others.
IV
Table 1 provides a broad overview of the Central Subject File, but its 30 lines cannot
possibly describe the wealth of information available in Record Group 82’s roughly
3,000 boxes and 30,000 files. To demonstrate the depth and value of the collection,
this section describes an illuminating example.
It is the St. 6386 series of forms on which the Board of Governors collected data
on changes of status for all banks operating in the United States, both members of
the Federal Reserve System and nonmembers, state and national, incorporated
and private from 1929 through 1933. Form St. 6386a reported bank consolidations.
Form St. 6386b reported bank suspensions. Form St. 6386c reported all other bank
changes. The surviving forms may be found in the National Archives, Record
Group 82, Federal Reserve Central Subject File, file number 434.-1, ‘Bank Changes
1921-1954 Districts 1929–1954 – Consolidations, Suspensions and Organizations –
St. 6386 a,b,c, (by states) 1930–1933’. The forms are filed alphabetically by state,
name of town or city, and name of bank. Multiple entries for individual banks
appear in chronological order.
The series comprehensively covers the commercial banking industry from
January 1929 through the national banking holiday in March 1933. Observations
exist for every event affecting every bank. These events include the major, such as
openings, closings, reopenings, receiverships, and consolidations, and the minor,
such as changes in Federal Reserve membership, capital stock, charter type, and
even street address. The forms also included financial information for each bank on
the date of each transaction.
The St. 6386b forms contain additional information concerning the cause of each
bank suspension. The Federal Reserve attributed most bank suspensions to one of
five common causes. The first was slow, doubtful, or worthless paper. The term worthless
paper indicated an asset with little or no value. The term doubtful paper meant an asset
131federal reserve archive survey
Table 1. Overview of the Central Subject File for the years 1913 to 1954
Decimal Box no.
From To From To Topic
001 029 1 29 Speeches and articles by members of Board of Governors,
employees of the Federal Reserve System, and
representatives of Federal Reserve district banks
030 054 30 54 Correspondence with organizations including Treasury
Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, War
Industries Board, Bank of International Settlements, etc.
100 104 55 71 Circulars, exhibitions and publications.
110 119 77 262 Legislation and related correspondence, studies, memos,
etc.
120 129 263 275 Reserve Organization Committee, 1913 to 1954
130 139 276 287 Federal Advisory Council, 1914 to 1954
200 219 288 299 Federal Reserve Board, terms of office, operations,
meetings, memos, conferences, committees, powers, etc.
220 239 300 341 Management, organization and daily operations.
240 249 342 434 Divisions: Examination, Bank Operations, Research and
Statistics, Issue and Redemption
250 259 435 539 Publications
260 269 540 587 Stock Market Regulation
300 309 588 699 Miscellaneous pertaining to Federal Reserve banks
310 319 700 821 Functions and powers of Federal Reserve banks
320 329 822 1212 Management, organization and operation of Federal
Reserve banks
330 339 1213 1589 Operations of Federal Reserve banks
400 419 1590 1770 Relations with and supervision of member banks
420 429 1771 1992 Powers and duties of member banks
430 439 1993 2153 Condition of member banks
450 450 2154 2155 Foreign banks in the United States
460 469 2156 2158 Interest rates charged by banks
470 471 2159 2166 Banking holiday
500 513 2267 2444 Economic conditions, surveys, data and analysis
520 520 2444 2444 Mining
540 540 2444 2444 Transportation
550 559 2445 2461 Gold
560 569 2462 2584 Business conditions
600 609 2585 2601 Currency, miscellaneous issues
610 619 2602 2616 Federal Reserve notes
620 629 2617 2618 Federal Reserve banknotes
630 649 2619 2643 Printing and shipment of currency
132 gary richardson
unlikely to yield book value. The term slow paper meant an asset likely to yield full
value in time, but whose repayment lagged or which could not be converted to
full cash value at short notice. The second common cause of suspension was heavy
withdrawals, the typical example being a bank run. The third was failure of a banking
correspondent. The fourth common cause was mismanagement. The fifth was defalcation,
a monetary deficiency in the accounts of a bank due to fraud or breach of trust. The
St. 6386b forms characterise the cause of each bank suspension according to these
criteria. Federal Reserve agents completed the forms as part of a regular reporting
process which brought information from the man on the spot who knew the facts of
the issue at hand to the attention of the leaders of the Federal Reserve System.
Similarly rich data exists on an array of topics. These include the debates over the
formation of post-World War II economic institutions, the call reports and materials
relating to call reports, analysis of the structure of the commercial banking system
during the 1920s, the deliberations over the conduct of monetary policy during the
depression, the internment of Japanese Americans, the mobilisation of the United
States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the demobilisation of the
military after the defeat of the Axis powers.
V
The principal costs of conducting research in the archives of the Federal Reserve
System are the time and expense of locating and copying documents. These costs are
so high that few researchers have ventured into the archives, despite their obvious
importance for the study of macroeconomics, monetary policy and economic
history. In hopes of reducing these costs and encouraging further research, this
section serves as a primer that explains where, when and how to access the archive.
The details that it provides should allow researchers to estimate the length of time
that they should allot for research and enable them to plan visits to the archives in a
way which minimises costs and maximises results.
The archives of the Federal Reserve are stored in Archives II, the National
Archives facility in the suburbs of Washington, DC, near the University of
Maryland’s College Park campus. The address and directions to the facility can be
found at NARA’s website: http://www.archives.gov/facilities/md/archives_2.
html. The link describes options for transportation to the archives. Local bus lines
run to and from downtown College Park and a nearby Metro (subway) station (time
to downtown Washington, DC, approximately 1.5 hours). NARA operates a free
shuttle bus service each hour to and from Archives I, a facility in downtown Wash-
ington, DC (time to downtown Washington, DC, approximately 45 minutes).
NARA operates the shuttle for its employees. Researchers may ride the shuttle
when space is available, which it generally will be, except for the last trip of the day,
when the shuttle occasionally fills to capacity. Then, researchers at the end of the
queue will be left behind. The quickest and easiest way to reach the archives is via
automobile (time to downtown Washington, DC, approximately 30 minutes).
133federal reserve archive survey
Parking is free, but capacity is limited. Researchers arriving after 10 a.m. may have
to wait from 10 to 20 minutes for a space.
Archives II is open Monday, Wednesday and Saturday from 8:45 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.,
and remains open until 9 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Longer hours
make these days particularly attractive to researchers. So, the parking constraint
binds earlier and more severely. Records may be retrieved from the stacks on
Monday through Friday at five specified times: 9:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m.,
1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. No records may be retrieved (a.k.a. pulled) on Saturday or
in the evening.
Records are pulled by the box. The maximum number of boxes that may be
pulled by a researcher at one time is the number of boxes that fill one cart. For the
Federal Reserve’s archives, which use a standard sized box, the maximum number
of boxes per pull is usually 24, although it may vary, if for some reason, a box is
unusually large or small. A researcher may have in the reading room one cart of
documents at a time. A researcher may have another cart of documents under
request (or previously pulled and waiting to be viewed). Thus, the number of carts is
the key constraint on a researcher’s ability to peruse the archives. You get five carts
a day. You must make the most of them. If you need more carts, bring a student,
colleague, or friend and register in the reading room as a group, so you can submit
multiple pull slips (one per researcher) and pull more than one cart at a time.
On your initial visit to the archives, you should plan at least half a day to retrieve
your first set of documents. The initial orientation (where you receive your
researcher identity card) lasts 30 minutes (or more if you must wait). Storing your
possessions, finding your way to and around the reading room, and figuring out how
to fill in the call slips will take at least another 30 minutes. Then, you must wait from
one to two hours for the documents to arrive. Before you submit your call slip, ask
the archivist on duty to double check the slips for clarity and accuracy, or your wait
will be in vain, and several hours of your time (and at least one of your precious
opportunities to pull a cart of boxes) will be wasted.
On the call slips, you need to indicate the identity of the boxes which you wish to
retrieve. The identifying information includes the box number, title, record group,
stack area, row, compartment and shelf. To find this information, you need to
consult the Record Group 82: Records of the Federal Reserve System binder located in the
Researcher Assistance Room adjacent to the second-floor main reading room.
Within the binder, an extremely short (five-page) preliminary inventory provides
a brief history of the Federal Reserve System but minimal information about the
records.5 An 11-page printout from the Master Location Register lists the different
sets of materials contained within the record group (which Section iii of this article
described), the number of boxes within each set, and the location in the stacks of the
first and last box in the set. A 90-page memorandum lists the complete decimal file
5J. E. Primas, Preliminary Inventory of the Records of the Federal Reserve System (Record Group 82),
NC-104, April 1965.
134 gary richardson
system of the Central Subject File, beginning with ‘001.4-c, Speeches and Articles –
Circulars – FR Banks 1941–1948’, and ending with ‘641.003, Cost of Printing,
Statement, 1915–1954’. The decimal system indicates the types of information
retained by the Federal Reserve between 1913 and 1954 and the way in which that
information was organised. The next item in the RG 82 binder, a 160 page ‘Box
List’, provides more detail about the organisation of the collection. The ‘Box List’
indicates the decimal number and file name for the first and last file in each of the
2,643 boxes in the Central Subject File. Additional box lists do the same for the
Federal Reserve Organization Committee, Federal Advisory Council, Federal
Open Market Committee, and minutes of the Board of Governors.
The binder contains similar materials for the records of the Division of
International Finance. A 10-page box list indicates the titles on the boxes which the
Federal Reserve transferred to the National Archives. A 25-page file list describes
the materials in the collection in a little more detail. Handwritten annotations on it
indicate the boxes pertaining to each topic. Another box list of approximately
200 handwritten pages indicates the boxes in which the materials now reside after
archivists reorganised the collection in recent years. The handwritten list has one
great advantage: it appears to list the titles of every file in every box. This detailed
information greatly simplifies finding materials of particular interest.
The final finding aid contained within the RG 82 binder is a three-page list
indicating the materials which scholars cannot examine without first obtaining
permission from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
In sum, RG 82 binder provides the initial point of access to the archives of the
Federal Reserve System. The finding guides within it contain the best information
about the contents of the collection.
Author’s address:
Department of Economics
3151 Social Science Plaza
University of California
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
USA
garyr @ uci.edu
