I am doing research for my PhD proposal. My research involves early 19th century US diplomacy.

The most important documents are in the National Archives in College Park, MD. The issue is that most people are only allowed access to microfilm. The documents are old, handwritten, and fragile, so I completely understand why. Short version: I really need to just consult the original documents and not use the microfilm records most people use. Should I write to the people at the National Archive via e-mail or will I have more success if I go in person?

Long version is that I need access to originals because:

a) A good many are written on thin paper leading the ink to bleed through, causing the microfilm to be semi-illegible.

b) All of the microfilm readers are over a quarter of a century old. As such the quality of images they project are rather poor, and none are compatible with flash drives, causing me to have to digitally photograph badly projected images which were difficult to read to begin with. This also means that if I need to review a great many documents I have to spend hours photographing these crappy microfilm screens and hoping the images that come out are legible once I get home.

c) The microfilm is in a deteriorated state. One key roll has a scratch through half of it, making hundreds of documents completely illegible. Others have tons of lines and other issues that compounded with the issues mentioned above make it all the more difficult to work with them.

I've reviewed original records from the 1820s before, for my undergraduate degree, but I got the feeling that I was allowed access to them in error and that the supervisor chewed out the guy who let me see them ("Wait, why are you even looking at the originals?"). I'm worried that if I write the request as an e-mail I'll get shot down, but I worry that maybe I'm over thinking this and should just make the request.