“It’s roughly in keeping that the National Archives imposes,” Friedel said.
Cataloguing Polis' social media presence will be a first for the library, Friedel said.
“[Polis] was sort of on the cutting edge for use of social media,” she said. “It's challenged us to really capture the constituent interaction that Jared had with folks in Colorado. So it's a really exciting time for us to document a political moment in Colorado's history in a very different and unique way.”
The social media archive, along with Polis’ website archive, will be available in early 2019.
Polis' library collection will include speeches, photographs, position papers, notes and constituent correspondence.
“Every day during my service as a congressman, I learned from my constituents, and together we witnessed an historic shift in politics,” Polis said in a news release Thursday. “Now, I’m proudly giving my archives to CU Boulder so that historians can also learn from what has occurred over the past decade in Congress. For my part, I hope that historians will find that service to my constituents was at the heart of everything I did.”
For the next 31 years until the embargo lifts, the library will catalog and preserve around 120 gigabytes of electronic records and up to seven boxes of papers from Polis’ office.
The library may receive even more documents in the future, Friedel said.
The CU Boulder library contains political materials from 15 former public officials dating back to 1907. The collection includes Colorado’s first female congresswoman, Rep. Pat Schroeder, and Sens. Gary Hart and Ken Salazar.
“I consider all our collections about Colorado politics and politicians to be foundational collections for understanding the cultural and social history of our state,” Friedel said. “Jared Polis’ congressional papers fall in line with those others that we currently also have and provide a more contemporary view of Colorado politics in the 21st century.”
Polis will be Colorado's 2nd Congressional District Representative to the U.S. House until Jan. 3, 2019. He will be sworn in as governor on Jan. 8, 2019 on the west steps of the State Capitol.
