Naval Archives

Today, several of my classmates and I joined two of our professors at the archives of the Navy Records Society. We were expecting an organized, library-like room, with row upon row of books. We could not have been further from reality.

The archives consist of two small rooms in a warehouse. The first room is full, floor to ceiling, of boxes of books. The boxes are labeled; however, we quickly discovered that the labels were wrong as often as not. The second room has several wooden pallets with boxes of books stacked on them, but most of the room is taken up by other items, such as office chairs and other office furniture.

We spend about two hours trying to hammer through the maze of books, but we were only able to get to about 40% of them. Out of those, each of us found some books that we wanted. Personally, I got about 20 books; most of the others got five or six.

In the interests of cleaning up the mess, the Society will be paying Dave and me to re-organize and label the boxes so that they can let people come in and go through the boxes to find books that they want. We'll be doing that on the 21st, so this little adventure isn't over yet.