The National Archives' facilities in the Washington, DC metropolitan area will be starting a pilot program in December 2014 to amend the pull-times for records requests. No definitive reason was given for this change, but it may have to do with work-flow and scheduling of federal employees. Flexible work hours, allowing federal workers to work outside of times when the building is open to the public, teleworking and the use of students & interns instead of permanent staff have all impacted on-site customer service for some time. It has also been difficult in the past for staff to clear the building after public hours. But this is just speculation. It is hoped that these changes will have an overall positive impact on customer service.
For walk-in patrons & clients at the facilities in Washington DC and College Park, Maryland, same day records requests can currently be submitted up to five times per day, Monday through Friday; at 10:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 1:30 PM, 2:30 PM and 3:30 PM. The pilot program will amend the afternoon pull-times to 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM, and 3:00 PM. This applies to all types of requests (military & pension, textual, motion & still pictures and cartographic). The morning pull-times of 10 and 11 AM will not be changing. It will still take approximately one-hour for records to be retrieved from stack locations and delivered to the research rooms. Additionally, they are restricting researchers in the later afternoon by eliminating the retrieval of records for any purpose after 4:30 PM, which means that unless a researcher already has records checked out for research prior to 4:30 PM, the researcher will not be able to look at records after that time.
As always - The facilities close at 5:00 PM daily, Monday through Saturdays and are closed on Sundays. Records requested during the week may be held for researchers and viewed or used on Saturdays prior to 4:30 PM, but not records requests are accepted on Saturdays.
