FOIA question

by LtDan61350

I had an appointment for the research rooms at the College Park Archives at the end of the month to get some USAAF records that are listed in the catalog. It was just cancelled this afternoon due to rising covid rates.

I've been waiting for this information for eighteen months, and the archives have suspended regular digitization and reproduction requests. Is there any way I can get this info through a FOIA request?

restricteddata

I'm afraid not. For two reasons:

  • I don't think you know how slow NARA CP is for FOIA. It can take years for them to start processing your request. Not joking. The backlog is massive.

  • Even when they do finally get something declassified, they don't mail it to you. They just put it on the shelves to be seen by a researcher. This is contrary to other agencies and even other branches of NARA. It drives me totally insane. "We declassified this file, now you can [spend hundreds or thousands of dollars, and a lot of your time, to] come to College Park and look at it."

The only way to get copies of stuff from NARA CP is to hire a researcher to go down there and get it for you. Which probably costs as much as going yourself.

Sorry about your NARA CP struggles. NARA CP is kind of awful in the best of times (they are dramatically underfunded for the volume of records they are responsible for), even worse at the moment. It is the most difficult archive that I've ever had to deal with. (But my friends who do work in French and Russian archives laugh at this and say my stories are mild compared to their struggles. Well, maybe.)

Now you might be thinking: What if I FOID'd the USAF? That might work, but if they have a record of having sent those files to NARA (they might, they might not), then they'll just say, "go to NARA." (FOIAing the USAF is really annoying because you have to know exactly which base and which branch to FOIA, and that's often super unobvious except in some cases where you know exactly who made the docment.)