Publication Date
January 1992
Abstract
The Congressional Papers Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists was organized in 1984 and in recent years has maintained a membership of approximately one hundred individual members representing sixty-five federal and government repositories and private institutions, large, medium, and small in size. In 1990/91, the roundtable conducted a survey of its non-federal government members in order to determine the kinds of institutions that actively were collecting congressional papers and. the levels of processing that were currently being conducted. Thirty-nine percent of the roundtable members responded. The survey dealt specifically with post-World War II congressional papers. This cut-off period was chosen in an effort to gauge the impact of copying and computer technology, which is represented in geometrically increasing bulk and impact on acquisition and processing. Rather the results , particularly in the area of description, illustrated a period of stagnation before the explosion of electronic means of description and access in the early 1990s.