David Alsobrook, currently director of the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, will join the Clinton Presidential Materials Project in Little Rock, Arkansas, as head archivist in late October, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported August 17.
Alsobrook will head a team consisting initially of four or five archivists who will begin the enormous task of organizing Clintoniana. The sheer quantity of presidential materials is greater than that of any preceding administration: Clinton has accumulated over 75 million papers, 1.85 million photos, and 75,000 gifts. Alsobrook is undaunted, however. “It just doesn’t get any better than that,” he told the Democrat-Gazette. “I anticipate a challenging job and I look forward to it.” Prior to his work at the Bush Library, Alsobrook was chief archivist for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta.
The first shipments of papers will arrive in Little Rock shortly after Alsobrook and his team set up a work space in an unused car dealership. The final site of the Clinton library is still up in the air as the Arkansas Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in a legal challenge by local citizen Nora Harris to derail the city’s purchase of land for the library.
Posted August 21, 2000.