please help me in welcoming jodi kanter to the washington, d.c. archives. [ applause ] >> thank you, i'm happy to be here. the setting is washington, d.c. winter of 1938. the curtain opens on an office rs but not any office. this one is so famous that has it's very own name, recognized around the world as a place of power, the oval office. seated at the desk in the house call home for the last five years, franklin roosevelt is worrying about history. in many ways, this is the very practice for which the office was designed, but he's not worried about shaping the content of history, but influencing public access to it. specifically, he's worried about whether millions of citizens from every part of the land have access to the historical documents to this time and place, to the story of what we have lived and are living today. he knows he wants to be able to answer this question differently than it's been answered before. along with some of his contemporaries, roosevelt is perhaps the first high-ranking politician to worry about public access to pre