Note: This post was previously listed under our "News from the Grey Box" blog series ​

Let’s decode that title of acronyms:

I’ll be presenting on the Byrd CLS’s work with the constituent services system (CSS) data at this years Society of American Archivist’s (SAA) meeting which is taking place this week in Washington, DC. I’m a member of the Congressional Papers Roundtable (CPR), and will be talking during one of the sessions on Wednesday.

My presentation will include what these CSS packages look like in the office, what data is exported from these systems into repositories (like the Byrd CLS), and what process we had to go through to make this data available and usable by researchers.

There will be time for discussion after our presentations (one other institution will also be presenting about their work), and I hope to raise important questions regarding legal protection over Congressional “personal papers,” why this data is important, and how we can better archive this data for future generations.

By Ray Smock

Saturday, August 9, 2014 is the 40th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, the only United States president to ever resign his office. He was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives, and on July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted overwhelmingly by a vote of 27 to 11, with six Republicans voting with the majority party,  to bring articles of impeachment to the floor of the House for the president’s direct involvement in the cover-up of a burglary of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC.

Anyone who was not at least 18 years old and following politics in 1974, and this includes a vast number of Americans born after 1956, may have a hard time appreciating  the gravity of this major Constitutional crisis and how agonizingly slow it was for the full story to unfold.  This crisis came in the middle of the presidential election of 1972, and near the end of the long and costly war in Vietnam that tore the nation apart.
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The burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters occurred on June 17, 1972, but there was no immediate connection to the president or the White House. That November President Nixon was re-elected in one of the greatest landslides in electoral history.