I've been to NARA 2 in College Park several times. I'm reading this as meaning that only researchers who will request records can enter the building now. The statement seems to be clumsily worded.

It suffices to say that it would be hard to justify closing down NARA 2 for researcher access. Room 2000 is the main reading room and it is one of the largest reading rooms I have ever been in. The building was built for people to come and visit and do research.

NARA 2 is a high security facility as it is. The last time that I visited was in 2019. You are searched one time upon entering the building. You (as a researcher) enter and go down to a large basement locker room where you can place most of your items in a locker. You can take a laptop and a scanner/camera to the first floor, get searched another time, then go up an elevator to the Room 2000, get searched again, and then take a seat and request materials (using triplicate forms, the last time I was there). You are searched again upon leaving the reading room.

Based on my experience, it sounds like they are going to remove one of the searches and put it at the entrance rather than at the elevators for the second floor, though I admit this is speculation.

The more difficult aspect would be having no parking access at the facility itself and having to take a bus there. I've taken the Metrobus to NARA 2 before and it was quite complicated the last time I went there, and I generally like public transportation. Every time I visited after that, I drove and parked in the garage, usually on the roof. That said, I can learn to manage the bus.

My partner works for NARA, but not in this office. Outside of the large amount of departures and RIF actions taken for the agency, there's lots of challenges regarding staffing for people who come in off the street and do not have succinct, coherent research questions. Staff are duty-bound to respond to all queries, regardless of how good they are.

I imagine this research card policy does two things:

1. Raises an easy bureaucratic barrier for people who just drop in and expect/demand help

2. Gives staff an opportunity to refuse access to people who may have non-research intent from accessing the building

It's likely the example you provided qualifies as a business need. They just don't want you hanging around and getting in the way of them helping people who scheduled a consultation, have an appointment, etc.

Totally agree on the poorly-constructed sentence. I wish they had said it more succinctly/precisely.

I believe you are interpreting “business need” as “commercial need” when I think it’s more like “what is your business here?” Purely anecdotal, but when I visited Moffett Federal Airfield to visit the aviation history museum there I asked the security guard at the gate checking my ID if I could ride my bike around the base afterwards. He said I needed a business purpose to being on the base and that visiting the museum was a business purpose but biking around aimlessly wasn’t.

The actual process of getting a research card does not mention any business need. It just asks to show ID and watch a training video:https://www.archives.gov/research/start/researcher-card. It specifically mentions student IDs.

But maybe that page is not updated yet with new policy.

It means if you are a crazy person, you can no longer waltz in off your motorcycle and demand all documents related to alien spacecraft held at Area 51 or the real unedited Zapruder film that clearly shows Walt Disney was the triggerman, etc.

My guess is anyone could still pursue whatever crazy theories they wanted, so long as they conducted their research legitimately, i.e., as a legitimate _process_ of research, with no value judgment on the topic or end goal.