Just off Adelphi Road in College Park lies a modern-day library of Alexandria, a repository of important government papers in a building half the size of the Pentagon.
Located at 8601 Adelphi Rd., the 1.7 million square foot building known as Archives II isn’t even visible from the road, and much of it is taken up by windowless rooms with rows and rows of shelves.
The publicly accessible portion of the building includes an airy glass lobby, an auditorium and an access area for records requests, which includes extensive genealogical resources that are the most popular at the facility.
Apart from that, the facility holds billions of photographs and films, maps and drawings, including a 1672 letter from the King of Denmark, the last will and testament of Adolph Hitler and wreckage from the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
The building opened in 1993 on land leased from the University of Maryland after the National Archives and Records Administration began to outgrow its facility in Washington, D.C.
It’s more accurate to say that NARA holds government records, not papers, since included are electronic records (born digital), motion pictures, digital photographs, etc.