COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Four George H.W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum employees are members of a team that has received the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Archivist’s Outstanding Achievement Award.
NARA faced several unique and complex challenges in meeting the expectations of the January 6 Committee and the public in responding to the Committee’s requests. These challenges included the delayed physical transfer of Trump electronic records to NARA, lack of dedicated Trump Library staff, and competing urgent requests from other congressional committees.
In January 2022, a team of geographically dispersed archivists from the Presidential Libraries and NARA offices was formed, and the work on these requests accelerated. This team overcame each challenge and identified creative solutions to ensure NARA could respond to these high-profile requests. In an intense, ever-changing environment, these archivists demonstrated their dedication to NARA’s mission, knowledge of Presidential records, flexibility, and agility in learning to use a newly acquired eDiscovery tool to review records.
NARA relied on the team’s experience, skill, and professionalism to respond to these special access requests received under the Presidential Records Act. This response is a critical piece of NARA’s mission. The statutory requirement for NARA to facilitate these requests constitutes some of the agency’s most high-profile and complex work. The team’s efforts demonstrated the importance of NARA’s mission and the talent of our employees to a wide audience.
For three months, the team worked more than 3,000 hours on the Committee’s request and conducted a review of more than one million records, including textual records, email messages, digital photographs, and video.
As a result of the review team’s efforts, NARA assembled the following records for the Committee: 1,974 textual pages, 12,473 email messages, 12,330 digital photographs. five videos, and White House visitor logs for multiple days.
The team from NARA received the award for urgently identifying, reviewing, and producing records in response to the high-profile special access requests from the House Select Committee. Buffie Hollis, Douglas Campbell, Jr., Dr. John Blair and R. Matthew Lee, from the Bush Presidential Library, received the Archivist’s Outstanding Achievement Award for Response to Urgent Special Access Requests from the House Select Committee on May 5, 2023 during an organization -wide online ceremony.