A Study Of The Rights Of American Citizens To Access The Public Records

The ultimate purpose of archives management is to achieve the utilization of the archives and the value maximization thereof. The value of archives can only be realized through the utilization, which is deeply rooted in the concept of the American citizens. However before 1966, the American citizens faced great obstacles in utilizing the archives, thus it is important to make relevant laws and regulations to support and guarantee the citizens’ archive use rights. It is not until the promulgation of the Freedom of Information Act in 1996 that the American citizens actually realize the archive use right, which guarantees the rights to know and use for the citizens. With the generation of private right in the utilization of archives, the United States has completed and standardized relevant laws and regulations from time to time so as to balance the right to know, right to use and private right and further guarantee the archive use right for the citizens. Nowadays, a complete system of laws and regulations on archives has been created, providing legal protection of archive utilization for the American citizens and significantly promoting the archives development in the United States.This paper studies on the original provisions and the development course of laws and regulations concerning archives utilization in the United States through methods of interdisciplinary research, comparative analysis and literature research. It analyzes the development of the laws and regulations chronologically, and finds out meaningful provisions related to the archives utilization of the American citizens systematically. In addition, this paper mainly analyzes the deficiencies of relevant laws and regulations with examples and the development thereof. By studying the archives use rights of the American citizens and combining the situation of China, the author tries to bring forward useful suggestions for the archive use right of Chinese citizens.