There have been numerous articles, speculation, and rumors about the proposed George W. Bush Presidential Library, to be located on the campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. We are now starting to get what can be considered the facts in the case.
First, the facility will be a single, multi-story complex on a hill, shifting from a two to a three-story building as the incline slopes downwards. The facility will be 207,000 square feet, making it over twice as large as his father’s library, the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University.
The library and the policy center will be separated by an internal wall. The building at Southern Methodist University will anchor the north part of a 32-acre tract along North Central Expressway north of Mockingbird Lane. Since blueprints have yet to be drawn, other revisions are likely to take place. Groundbreaking is expected next year.
The National Archives will operate the library, museum and archival storage, and the Bush Foundation will be housed in and run the 66,000 sq. ft. policy center. The Library and the policy center will share the same lobby.
In preparation for the library, the National Archives now has eight employees working at Southern Methodist University, and plans to staff the Bush library with 18 archivists. George W. Bush’s hard-copy documents and artifacts are currently being stored at a warehouse in Lewisville, with the last scheduled shipment to arrive this month.
The archives has already uploaded at least two out of 100 terabytes of digital archives to its electronic records system, something our ancestors’ presidents didn’t have to worry about.
Read further details about the George W. Bush Presidential Library in the February 17, 2009 edition of the Dallas Morning News.