I'm not at all hostile to "at no charge" access, in fact I fully support it and would be much more upset if the article had been "US Archives decides to charge $100 entry fee" than I was about the actual article "US Archives won't let you in until you register and show ID and give some plausible reason why you need to look at specific things".

I am pretty skeptical of "let random people touch difficult to replace things when you don't know who they are".