Fully Digitized Collections or Series
- Master Speech File
- FDR’s Map Room Papers
- FDR’s President’s Secretary’s File (PSF)
- Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations
- Presidential Press Conferences
- Eleanor Roosevelt Selected Correspondence: 1933-45
- Eleanor Roosevelt Selected Correspondence: 1945-47
- Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Diaries
- Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Press Conferences
- Records of the War Refugee Board
- The FDR Library Significant Documents Collection
- The Grace Tully Collection
- Library Documents and photographs about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the New Deal, and World War II were sent to the Roosevelt Library to be preserved and made available to researchers.
- Collection Documents are kept in collections based on who created the materials.
- Box Special archival boxes help organize and protect the materials inside each collection. The Roosevelt Library has over 20,000 boxes of documents.
- Folder Folders help organize the documents into units based on the way these files were originally created and used. Each box holds several folders of varying page amounts.
- Document The Roosevelt Library houses about 17 million pages of documents, thousands of which are now available online through FRANKLIN. All of FRANKLIN’s documents are posted in archival context so you can easily find and navigate through the original collection, box, and folder information.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum
What is FRANKLIN?
FRANKLIN is a virtual research room and digital repository that provides free and open access to the digitized collections of the Roosevelt Library—to everyone, anywhere in the world. Whether you are a lover of history, a student working on a school project, or a scholar, FRANKLIN allows you to keyword search for archival documents and photographs and to search, browse, and view whole files, just as you could if you came to the Library’s research room in-person. Now available online are some of the most important documents of the twentieth century—primary source documentation of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s experiences leading the nation through the Great Depression and World War II.
What can you find in FRANKLIN?
Digital copies of significant documents and photographs from the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum. FRANKLIN hosts over 800,000 pages of archival documents and 2,500 historical photographs, along with many detailed descriptions of archival collections not yet digitized. Users can search the digital collections by keyword or go directly browse the full lists of digitized archival folders in a virtual research room environment. Documents include Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s New Deal and wartime correspondence with world leaders, government administrators, and regular Americans. Photographs include public domain images of the Roosevelts throughout their respective lifetimes, as well as subject areas like the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II.
Is everything digitized?
Not yet. FRANKLIN hosts two of the major collections of FDR’s Papers as President, selected Eleanor Roosevelt correspondence, the complete Diaries of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgethau, Jr., and several smaller batches of in-demand archival materials. The Roosevelt Library has an ongoing and ambitious digitization program and will post additional historical materials to Franklin on an ongoing basis. A list of fully digitized collections or series appears on FRANKLIN’s home screen.
About this project
FRANKLIN is the result of a special cooperative effort—a unique combination of public, nonprofit, and corporate support. The Roosevelt Library and its parent agency, the National Archives, worked with nonprofit partner the Roosevelt Institute to digitize a large amount of microfilmed archival documents. The Library’s digital partner and web host, Marist College, then developed and implemented FRANKLIN’s underlying database infrastructure based on the Archon platform. Marist runs the system using powerful servers manufactured by Marist and Roosevelt Library corporate partner, IBM.
In the future all of FRANKLIN’s documents will also become available to online users of the National Archives online catalog, Online Public Access (or OPA).