Supplementing its usual daily research traffic, the opening of more Chiang Kai-shek diaries and a two-week visit by the Hoover Soviet Archives Research Project team saw the Hoover Archives achieve a new visitor record on July 14. On that day, forty-two visitors were assisted by Hoover staff.
In the archival world, most repositories have a great many unique manuscript collections, each of which may be used by just a handful of people during a given year. Some of Hoover’s acquisitions, however, are blockbusters, including the Chiang Kai-shek diaries, which 262 researchers examined last year; the Archives of the Soviet Communist Party microfilm collection logged nearly two hundred users.
The number of visitors using the poster collection, our third most popular collection, may decline as more of the posters become viewable online. But because copyright laws prevent publication of most modern manuscript material on the Internet, the reading room will continue to be a must visit for many researchers.
