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Several international unions which have national offices in the greater Washington, D.C. area have sought assistance from the University of Maryland at College Park, the state's land grant institution, in preserving their archival records. A combination of developments also contributed significantly to the creation of a labor archives program at College Park, the formal establishment of what is now called the Historical Manuscripts and Archives Department in 1972 and the commencement of the Samuel Gompers Papers Project at the University campus in 1973. The first major archival collection to arrive at College Park was the records of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA) in 1967. The archives located at College Park provide in-depth documentation on the origins of the union, its contact with civilian and military agencies during World War II, labor and race relations during the war, and the union's efforts to combat the decline of the shipbuilding industry during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The article presents information about the George Meany Memorial Archives, for which a new building was dedicated on the campus of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland, ending the formative years of the Archives and creating a national center for the study of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The Meany Archives serves as the official archives of the AFL-CIO and has defined as its collecting scope the records of the federation and its predecessor organizations, the constitutional trade and industrial departments, affiliated institutes and selected personal papers of AFL-CIO officers and staff. It is the plan of the Archives to eventually become a national clearing house for information about labor-related archival collections through participation in the Chadwick-Healey Inc. micropublication "The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States" and through cooperation with the "Labor Archives Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists."