There are about 13.5 billion records in the United States national archives, and it’s Colleen Shogan’s job to preserve them and make them available to the public. Shogan is the 11th national archivist in U.S. history and the first woman appointed to the position.
Her oversight includes 42 archival facilities across the country including 15 of America’s presidential libraries, which bring together the documents and artifacts to tell the history of each presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.
On Wednesday, Shogan made her inaugural visit to the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, home of hundreds of thousands of documents from Richard Nixon’s presidency and lifetime. She spent the bulk of her day discussing how her agency can work with local staff and the Nixon Foundation to increase access to historical records.
Since assuming office in May 2023, Shogan, a former graduate fellow in American politics at Yale University, instructor at Georgetown University and senior executive at the Library of Congress, has been making it a point to visit every national archive in her domain to identify ways to enhance the public accessibility of records, she said.
“My vision for the archives is to improve access to our nation’s records,” she said. “Whether they’re federal records from agencies all across the country and presidential records at all our presidential libraries, we’re trying to figure out ways that more Americans can interact with the records in a useful and productive way.”
That mission strikes a resonant chord at the Nixon Library, where staff are tasked with telling a story of a presidency simultaneously defeated by secrecy yet responsible for producing one of the largest troves of public documents, photographs and tapes in presidential history. For years, Nixon covertly recorded nearly every conversation he had in the Oval Office, as well as other areas of the White House and Camp David, creating a never-before-matched and highly controversial bounty of presidential records.
After visiting the Nixon exhibits for the first time, Shogan said she was left with a message about the ups and downs in life and leadership.
“The main theme of the exhibits I would say is that you can’t know your success in life if you haven’t had failures, and, for sure, that’s a great message for young people to be able to learn about and to learn from Richard Nixon,” she said.
More than 50 years on, many of Nixon’s presidential endeavors are relevant today. Navigating foreign policy with China, negotiating a war in Israel, nominating four justices to the Supreme Court, contending with domestic challenges around environmental and racial injustices, addressing gender inequality and managing a drug crisis. Any one of these issues could affect the 2024 presidential election as much as they shaped the Nixon White House.
Tamara Martin, the director of the Nixon Library, said researchers still flock to the archives to study all kinds of aspects of the Nixon administration, including his legacy far beyond Watergate. For example, his administration created the Environmental Protection Agency, oversaw the Apollo space missions and strove to put more women in government positions across agencies, Martin said.
“The Nixon story is a big story and there’s a lot of information in the records that we want to share with the public,” she said.
But a half-century later, some Nixon-era documents remain classified.
Shogan works with other agencies to declassify as much information as possible to make it available to researchers and the public. Some of what remains classified, she said, has to do with human intelligence — espionage. If released, the information could threaten the living connections of spies and potentially harm diplomatic relationships with other countries, she said.
But the biggest hurdle toward declassification is a resource problem, Shogan added.
“In the United States, the amount of money we put into classifying all kinds of information versus the amount of funding we have set aside to declassify information, I mean, it’s not even comparable,” she said. “There’s hundreds and hundreds of times more resources going to classifying information than declassifying it.”
Bureaucracy is another challenge.
“So, if we have a record from Nixon’s presidency and it’s been classified, let’s say, by the Defense Intelligence Agency and also the CIA, we can’t at the National Archives just look at that information and say it’s over 50 years old, certainly we should be able to release that. We don’t have the authority to be able to do that,” she explained. “We have to work with those other classifying agencies, in this example the DIA and CIA, and they both have to agree to declassify.”
Streamlining that interagency process as much as possible is something Shogan helps Martin and other local archivists with.
Another of her goals is to digitize the national archives to improve their accessibility.
Walk into the Nixon Library and the first of the former president’s quotes any visitor sees is written in bright silver letters on the entrance wall: “Libraries can be passive, dry repositories of books and documents. I hope that the Nixon Library and birthplace will be different — a vital place of discovery and rediscovery, of investigation and contemplation, of study, debate and analysis.”
In many ways, this Nixon quote speaks to Shogan’s task to shepherd a pen-and-paper archive into a digital age.
“The notion of an archive or a library is changing,” she said. “It’s not going to be the same as it was 10 years ago. The National Archive as a whole agency is still a predominantly paper or analog archive, but I would say in 20 years it’s going to be a predominantly digital archive.”
“It doesn’t mean you don’t need to have a library or an archive,” she said. “Because of the proliferation of information in the digital age, it actually means that you need to have it more because you’re going to need archivists to help users sort through all that information to find records that are responsive to what they’re searching for.”
For now, she’s moving full steam ahead on America 250, a retrospective of the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026. At each presidential library, the program will feature letters written from ordinary citizens to presidents. Many such letters written to Nixon for or against his policy in Vietnam are currently on display in Yorba Linda.
“A national display of letters lets people look back and put history in context,” she said. “We have a tendency to be very presentist. That’s just how we are as human beings. So, we think there’s never been anything like what we’re going through right now. But if you go back and read those letters, you see, actually, Americans were very concerned all throughout our history.”
“With the emotion that they have writing to their president, either being very happy with what the president has done or very displeased with the actions the president has taken,” She said, “we’re going to bring that to life. And, I think people are really going to like that resource.”
