Access/Information’s Document Retrieval service provides publicly available records that, depending on the nature of the request, can be found all over the world via internet, through old-fashioned phone calls, or just about anywhere in the Metropolitan area of Colorado on foot or by car. We have been to countless academic libraries, the court houses, city and county buildings, the State Capitol, and, if a project requires it, the National Archives and Records Administration.
Access/Information is listed on NARA’s online directory of researchers specializing in records held at their brand new Broomfield location at 17101 Huron Street, (Broomfield, CO 80023-8909). We specialize in research services for the legal and business communities, including document retrieval related to Federal Courts archived records and other federal agency/department public records for the western region.
Recently a client needed to quickly find a letter written by a Director of the United States Bureau of Reclamation Service regarding a water project in the United States. All we knew was his name, the area of the water project and that the letter was written in the early parts of the 20th Century taken from an excerpt of a letter written by a Commissioner.
By working closely with the experts at the Archives we were able to reduce our search of possible boxes to 18, by carefully reviewing the Bureau of Reclamation indexes for certain water projects, years, and types of records, such as land leases, construction & operations, repayments, petitions for reservation of lands for community centers, and parks.
We read countless handwritten letters and trained our eyes for any mentioning of his name. Not only was it difficult to read their handwriting, but we had to be very careful when handling the very thin tissue like paper they used back then.
The Archives in Denver have nearly 50,000 cubic feet of original archival records dating from 1847 to the 1990s. Papers could be about homesteading, Indian reservation, railroads, water projects, World War II, and the list goes on. It feels great finding the “needle in the haystack” at NARA!