Archival Research

National Archives, Library of Congress, NIH Library, FOIA & MDR

 NIH Library

Research for clients at the NIH Library located just outside Washington, DC in Bethesda, Maryland.  This is one of the best repositories of scientific documents in the world.

Documents exist as photocopyable hard copies and microfilms. Black and white photocopies are 12 cents per page.  Color copying or printing is $1.00  per page.

A special note about outputs at NIH Library:

Because most of the research papers in this science library are in the form of tightly-bound journals or microfilm, photocopying is the only sensible option. These photocopies can then scanned at home on a scanner/feeder and digitized to produce "text-recognized"* PDF files. These can be either e-mailed on a nightly basis to the client or, in the case of files too large for e-mail, posted to a website for easy downloading.

* Note: Searchable text-recognized PDF files are created after the image has been converted into a PDF file using an OCR (optical character recognition) program. Such files are searchable by many search engines, such as Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search or the search tool that in included with Adobe Acrobat Reader. These search tools do not work with handwriting and can be imprecise, especially with old documents written with manual typewriters.