ABSTRACT
The name Arthur Flegenheimer may be unfamiliar to all but specialists in criminal history, but this type of inquiry about obscure individuals is not an unusual one for the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. To the archivists at this, the first of the presidential libraries, founded in 1940 by President Roosevelt himself, such inquiries are routine, sandwiched in between letters from scholars seeking what is available on the Pearl Harbor attack and fourth grade students urgently hunting for copies of everything on the Great Depression. As it turns out, the information on Mr. Flegenheimer, alias ‘‘Dutch Schultz,” is easily located in the diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr. by using the subject card index created by Mr. Morgenthau’s secretary and presently available in the Library’s Research Room. This paper will examine how archivists prepare and make available to researchers the Library’s resources and attempt to answer similar inquiries.
