of cards added to our index files. In short, we have made every
effort to prepare finding aids for the use of the public. An ex-
amination of the finding projects now in preparation will indi-
cate that this work is far from complete. It has been our policy
to service records immediately after their arrival even if that
means the postponement of other projects already under way,
for simply to care for records physically is only half the work
of an archival establishment: to hold them safe in the vault
removed from the eyes of the historian and the governmental
officer who need them is a service of questionable value.

From the beginning of the Hall of Records until 1941 there
was no change in legislation governing its duties. In that year
two acts were passed providing (1) that any governmental
agency wishing to have its records copied might send them to
the Hall of Records to be photostated or otherwise reproduced
photographically rather than to have them copied by any of the
older manual methods and (2) that any governmental agency
wishing to dispose of its records must first offer them for deposit
at the Hall of Records. In the case of this first Act, the Hall of
Records became a partner for the first time in the preservation
of records not destined for deposit at the Hall of Records, and
in the case of the second Act, the Hall of Records found itself
the judge—with some exceptions and subject to the approval of
the Board of Public Works—of what records should be pre-
served at the Hall of Records, what records should be pre-
served in the office of origin and what other records should be
destroyed. By virtue of these new duties we became something
more than a depository for "historical" records. We were
launched into the important and complex problem of the care of
almost all the governmental records of the State.

That our original historical function was not forgotten,
however, was demonstrated by an Act passed by the Legislature
of 1945. Whereas every custodian of records was permitted
by Chapter 18, Acts of 1935, to deposit his non-current records
in the Hall of Records, he is now required to deposit those cre-
ated before the adoption of the Federal Constitution by Chapter
248, Acts of 1945. (See page 44.)

These additional duties have been performed by the Hall of
Records staff with the same number of members and approxi-