Dr. Colleen Shogan Photo credit: Susana Raab for the National Archives

Dr. Colleen Shogan took the oath of office as the 11th Archivist of the United States—the chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—in May 2023, succeeding former Archivist David Ferriero. She is the first woman to permanently hold the role. Since then, Shogan has been working to make NARA’s holdings more accessible to researchers; members of the public who want to look up the history of their families, communities, or presidents; and anyone who wants to see the United States’ founding documents up close.

LJ caught up with Shogan to hear about her national tour of presidential libraries, NARA’s stepped-up digitization efforts, and preserving the record of presidential cat Socks.

LJ : What did your path to becoming Archivist of the United States look like?

Dr. Colleen Shogan: I’m not a librarian or an archivist by profession. I’m a political scientist. I taught at George Mason University, outside of Washington, DC—the presidency, Congress, intro to American politics, those types of things. I was at the job for four years, and I took a year off to work on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. That’s really what changed my career trajectory, because I went to work in the United States Senate, and I ended up staying and working as a legislative aide and leaving my job at George Mason. That put me on the path to public service. After that I went to the Library of Congress, to the Congressional Research Service [CRS]. I spent eight years at CRS, and that’s where I learned a lot about Congress and Capitol Hill. Then I transitioned into a senior executive position at the larger Library of Congress. That was important too, because I learned how the Library of Congress functioned as an agency, and how all their public programming worked. I was in charge of everything that was public facing, like the National Book Festival, events, visitor services, the gift shop, things of that nature. I spent four years working in that area, and after all that time focused on Congress and that side of Washington, I had a great opportunity to become a senior vice president at the White House Historical Association. That job, in combination with being the vice chair of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, led me to my path to become the President’s nominee to become the Archivist.

I’ll be honest—none of it was planned. If you had told me three or four years ago, “You’re going to become Archivist of the United States,” I would have said, “What are you talking about?” It just wasn’t on my radar. But now, when I look back on it, every step that I took was important for the experience needed to become the Archivist. I think the real piece that threads throughout my career is that I’m a political scientist, I’m a researcher. I bring that background and that experience. I used the presidential library system and its resources when I was an academic, when I was a scholar writing about the presidency, and then certainly while I was at the White House Historical Association, when my team was doing a lot of research and work heavily reliant upon presidential libraries.

Can you talk a bit about your plans to strengthen the public’s connection to the National Archives? It feels like parallel work to what Library of Congress is doing.

I’m glad that you intuited that, because that’s actually what I’ve been driving at. I worked for two different librarians at LoC, Dr. [James] Billington, and Carla Hayden. I got to see the early tenure of Dr. Hayden up close and personal, how she transformed the Library of Congress so that all Americans would feel welcome there—that was really her goal. So I’ve taken what I’ve learned from her and from that experience and I’ve been applying it here at the National Archives. I want to improve both digital and in-person experiences.

If you’re going to visit us online at archives.gov, we want to make sure that you’re having a good digital experience, whether you want to understand something about a particular era in American history or you’re doing targeted research. I’ve started Ask the Archives, which is an online chat function, open several hours a day. You can come on to our website and chat with an archivist in real time, and those archivists are trained to be able to triage your request. Sometimes they might be able to immediately help you with what you want; in other cases, they can put you in connection with the archivist that can help you with your research request, or we can direct you to the archival facility where your request would be best answered.

For our in-person experiences, we’re very interested in making sure we’re ready for the influx of visitors we know we’re going to have in 2026, when the Declaration of Independence turns 250 years old. We have added an entire Visitor Services team that did not exist when I came on board. When you walk into the building here in Washington, DC, you are met with a number of Visitor Services staff who are able to direct you and answer questions about the history of our building, the history of the Rotunda, and what you’re seeing in front of you. When people come to our research rooms in person, either here in Washington or one of our presidential libraries, we have to make sure that we are making the most of their experience.

Doing outreach through the media is really important anywhere that I travel. This week I’m going to the Hoover Library right outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to visit the library and engage with that community. I’m going to be doing a lot of media with local papers, television stations, public radio, so that I’m able to reach not only the media outlets here in Washington, which are great, or the national media outlets, but also those local media outlets and places where we have archival facilities or presidential libraries to tell them what the National Archives does.

You’ve been on a grand tour of NARA facilities across the country. What have you found that excited you or surprised you?

Dr. Shogan in National Personnel Records Center with archive retrieval bike Photo credit: John Valceanu for the National Archives

What’s been surprising to me, in general is [the] 13 and a half billion pages of analog records. That’s what our holdings are right now. And you can say, well, that’s a huge number, and it is. But you can’t really grasp that until you start to see what that volume looks like in actuality. For example, our National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis is an enormous facility. When you go into our stacks area where we keep all of the veteran service records, it’s a warehouse of records, all the way from the floor to the ceiling—you have to get up on a trolley to go up to the top—that goes very far. You almost can’t see the end of it. But you’re actually on a catwalk [at ground level], and below you is the exact same thing—there’s actually two levels. The fact that we hold all of our nation’s veterans’ records in our trust, when you see what that means in actuality—it’s really striking, the vastness. And our National Personnel Records Center in Valmeyer, Illinois, just north of that, where our civilian federal service records are located, is a cave structure. That cave is a mile long, so our archivists, if they have to retrieve a record all the way at the other end, have to ride a bicycle. You know what it takes to walk a mile, even if you’re going pretty fast—it’s maybe a 20-minute mile. So imagine 20 minutes out, 20 minutes back, just to retrieve a record. They have these friendly little bicycles that they take that make their retrieval time a lot quicker. So the sheer vastness of what the National Archives is responsible for is what really strikes me, to view these facilities and locations.

I think the most surprising is when I was at the Clinton Library in Little Rock. Wherever I go, they usually pull some records for me to see, so they had pulled some of President Clinton’s speech drafts and other important documents, and among them was a picture of President Clinton and Socks, the cat. And I said, “Oh! I was a teenager when President Clinton came into office. My family had dogs, but I persuaded my parents to adopt a cat because I liked Socks so much.” They said, “Oh, so you liked Socks? Well, you should really come in here. We’re photographing Socks right now”—we’re doing professional photography of all the objects in our collection at the various presidential libraries for a platform called eMuseum, so people can see high-quality images of all the objects. I thought they meant they were photographing a portrait or a statue of Socks. I go in the other room and there’s this very nice urn, and they said, “This is Socks.” After Chelsea Clinton went to college, the Clintons took their dog, Buddy, with them, and Buddy and Socks did not get along. They left Socks with Betty Currie, who was President Clinton’s executive secretary. When Socks passed away and was cremated, one-third of Socks went to Chelsea, because he was Chelsea’s cat, one-third went to Betty Currie, and one-third went to the Clinton Library. So, I got to meet Socks, finally, in a different format.

I was a little worried that you were going to say he was taxidermized.

No, he was very elegantly photographed in a beautiful urn.

Speaking of digitization, how is NARA addressing its own push to digitize its backlog of documents?

A few months ago, we opened a mass digitization center in our College Park, Maryland, location. We have a number of very high-powered machines for digitization, and we hired new staff. We’ve discovered we can increase our digitization rates tenfold with the addition of this new center, so we’re very excited about that. This is really going to be a game changer for us.

We are very focused on records right now. The Alaska Native records’ permanent home is in Seattle, but we want to get them into the hands of Alaska natives, who many times need access to the records—it’s quite a trip for [them] to come to Seattle. We moved those records to College Park, and they’re now being processed, with the idea that we can do this fairly quickly and get as many as possible online and in our catalog. We’re doing priority collections like that. Another example would be for records that are heavily used because people are interested in them for genealogy purposes. A lot of times people hit a dead end in their genealogy [searches], but then they use veterans’ pensions records, and they’re able to find out a lot of information. That’s great, but sometimes these records are so heavily used, and they’re pulled so often, they’re really good candidates for digitization—so that people don’t have to come and see us in person to have access to those records, but also as a method of preservation.

Given recent news about the handling of presidential records, do you have any concerns about the turnover of records after the upcoming election?

Our policies and procedures are in place, and they’re good policies and procedures. We know at this point in time, of course, that there’s going to be a transition, because President Biden is not running for another term in office. So we are engaged with the White House about that transition, how those records will come to us, both non-classified and classified. I’m really not concerned about that, because we do have the procedures in place, and we will continue to do our job and make sure that’s resourced properly.

What’s in the works for NARA going forward?

We do have close to 300 million records digitized, but right now we are predominantly an analog archive. That is going to change in the near future, I would say in the next 10 or 15 years, between our digitization efforts and the fact that we are going to start accessioning digital records beyond just emails from presidential administrations—we are going to start to accession born-digital records from federal agencies. Once those federal record schedules start to play out, we are going to be, very quickly, a predominantly digital archive. One of the things I’m focused on is making sure we are building both the technical infrastructure and the staff infrastructure to be able to support that transition, because right now we’re not ready for it. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, so it’s okay, but we need to start that important work right now so that in a decade we will be ready for the huge onslaught of digital records that will come our way—not only that can we accession them and store them and preserve them, but can we have an application that is able to serve them? Whether you’re looking for something really broad—maybe you’ve got a high schooler who’s doing a National History Day project on World War II, or you’re a researcher looking for a particular answer to your own genealogical question or your own academic or scholarly question—we need to be able to serve those ranges of inquiries, and we have to build the system to be able to do that. I’m very focused on putting the building blocks in place.

The 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026 is another thing that I am focused on, because that’s got a deadline and it’s staring me right in the face. We’re very excited about that, because we think this is another opportunity for NARA to be able to share records publicly. There’ll be a lot of natural interest in the archives with people coming to see the Declaration of Independence. We’re going to be adding the Emancipation Proclamation to the Rotunda, so that will also be on permanent display, in addition to the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. That will be out there in January 2026, so I would just encourage people to start planning your trips early.