Exhibit Loans

The National Archives and its Presidential Libraries loan items to qualified institutions for exhibition purposes in order to make the nation's records available to the public across the country and around the world. Loans include items of special interest to local and regional museums and their communities while also helping to foster civic literacy. 

Here are examples from the National Archives' long record of taking history to the people:

• The Freedom Train traveled the United States with many of our nation's documentary treasures between 1947 and 1949.
• The Navajo Treaty of 1868 traveled to Northern Arizona University, where it was viewed by thousands from the nearby Navajo Nation in 1998.
• The Morrill Act of 1862 visited land grant universities in Iowa, Illinois, and Montana between 2008 and 2010.
• The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library loaned a Chinese scroll to several museums in China in 2012.
• In 2013, A Mauthausen death register recovered from the Nazi concentration camp in May 1945 was loaned to the Mauthausen National Memorial in Austria for a new exhibition in the former infirmary where the deaths were originally recorded in the register.