Public access to presidential records...

I was recently asked by my employer to pen an article about presidential libraries and recent controversies surrounding restricted access to presidential records. On Friday, the article was published on their web site. Here's a link to my article and a brief excerpt...

Just a day after his inauguration, on Jan. 21, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order revoking the George W. Bush administration’s Executive Order 13222 — an order that many historians and open-government advocates argued severely limited access to the records of former presidents.

President Obama’s new executive order is just the latest in a long history of laws and regulations affecting presidential libraries and presidential records. Drawing on the work of other archivists, presidential-records scholars, and journalists, this article provides a brief historical overview of our nation’s presidential libraries and the laws affecting access to presidential records. This article also looks at some more recent access controversies involving presidential records...

Click here to read the entire article.