<P> In November 1935, 120 National Archives staff members moved into their uncompleted building . Most of the exterior work was complete, but many stack areas, where records would be stored, had no shelving for incoming records . Work also continued on the Rotunda and other public spaces . More significantly, earlier estimates about the need for future stack space proved to be quite insufficient . Almost as soon as Pope's original design was complete, a project to fill the Archives' interior courtyard began, doubling storage space from 374,000 square feet to more than 757,000 square feet . </P> <P> John Russell Pope's vision of the Archives as a temple of history has been preserved through maintenance and periodic restoration work on the building since the mid-1930s . Over the years, however, more records filled the building and even the courtyard expansion proved to be inadequate . By the late 1960s, the building reached its storage capacity of 900,000 cubic feet and the agency began renting large amounts of storage and administrative space . The 1993 completion of a second National Archives building in College Park, Maryland, added 1.8 million square feet to the National Archives, providing the nation with the most modern archives facility in the world . </P> <P> The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights have been displayed to the public in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building since 1952 . That year National Bureau of Standards placed the documents into hermetically sealed encasements filled with inert helium gas, which the Bureau believed would preserve the Charters well into the next century . Since the 1952 installation, National Archives conservators have conducted regular visual inspections of the encased documents . Since 1987, these inspections have been greatly enhanced through the use of an electronic imaging monitoring system developed for NARA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California . </P> <P> In an electronic inspection of the documents in 1995, conservators noticed changes in the glass encasements of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights . Glass experts from Libby - Owens - Ford (the original manufacturer of the encasement glass) and the Corning Glass Museum determined that the case glass components were showing signs of deterioration . Both the glass experts and the National Archives Advisory Committee on Preservation recommended that the Charters be reencased within seven years (by 2002) to ensure the continued safety and preservation of the documents . </P>

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