ARCHIVIST OF THE HALL OF RECORDS 7

Management (as essay on our ten years of formal records management
will be found elsewhere in this report). Nine staff members of a total
of twenty-two are in Records Management and $68,000 of a total
appropriation of $150,000. And we have only begun. It has long been
known that the problem of keeping records is ultimately bound to the
making of records, records cannot be microfilmed efficiently if they
are of many colors, if they are folded; they cannot be destroyed
economically if they are stapled or not properly indexed. As services
and offices grow, the problem of maintaining records—such as those
of the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles—is incomprehensible to any
but the highly trained specialist. All this is called Paper Work Manage-
ment. We have ventured but a hesitant step or two in this field. In a
world so irrevocably wedded to more and more functions of govern-
ment and more and more records there is no course open to the
Archivist but to try to meet the challenge. Some of us will regret the
dusty tome and the forgotten bin, but our work in the future will lead
us there but seldom.

Respectfully submitted,

MORRIS L. RADOFF
Archivist and Records Administrator