Calling the Obama Presidential Center the Obama “Library” is wrong.
Yes, there is a Chicago Public Library branch at the center. But that is not the same thing as a presidential library run by the National Archives and Records Administration. The NARA owns all the digital and print presidential records and physical artifacts of former president Barack Obama’s presidency. The NARA is tasked in preserving them in perpetuity.
Here are two major reasons Obama and the Obama Foundation opted out of the NARA system in 2017.
- In 2017, Obama jettisoned the official presidential library from the Jackson Park project to be free of NARA’s expensive endowment, saving himself the need to fundraise tens of millions more. If the Obama Center included the NARA-operated Obama Library, the foundation would have to pay NARA an endowment that would be 60% of the library cost. (The whole campus is estimated to cost at least $850 million.) Congress raised the tab to 60% in 2008, the year Obama was elected. Chicago’s City Hall has never pressed the Foundation for a substantial endowment to be held by the city if it was ever necessary to cover costs to operate and maintain the center.
- Obama was very involved in designing the interior and exterior of the campus. He would have needed NARA approvals if the campus included a NARA-run library. NARA has strict expensive architecture and design standards to make sure the building is secure for the ages, with highly regulated humidity levels to preserve everything. Getting rid of NARA gave Obama a totally free hand.
Building a branch of the Chicago Public Library on the campus was much cheaper and served to obscure the fact the Center did not have an official presidential library. So yes, there is a library at the Obama Presidential Center. Just not a presidential center with the artifacts and papers from Obama’s two terms.
Here is the backstory.
In the beginning, the project was to be an official presidential library. When the creation of the Barack Obama Foundation was announced on Jan. 31, 2014, the foundation said in a release it will “begin planning President Obama’s future Presidential Library.”
Hosting an official presidential library was a hook used to persuade the Chicago Park District and the City of Chicago to let the foundation build on 19.3 acres of historic park land in Jackson Park in return for a $10-a-year, 99-year lease.
By the time Obama wrapped up his second term at noon, Jan. 20, 2017, trucks had pulled up to the White House and hauled everything to a former furniture warehouse at 2500 Golf Road in northwest suburban Hoffman Estates. That’s where NARA’s official Obama Presidential Library set up shop.
There was no hint Obama and the foundation had another plan brewing.
On May 3, 2017, the Obamas were in Chicago for a public unveiling of a “conceptual” model of the Obama campus in Jackson Park. There was no mention that the Obama’s pulled the plug on a presidential library in Chicago housing the original records from the two-term Obama administration.
That news came out in a press release later in the day.
The reasoning was since Obama was the first “digital” president, you really didn’t need to build a new official library in Chicago. The Foundation is paying NARA millions to digitize an estimated 25 million paper documents that, along with 35,000 artifacts, had been in Hoffman Estates. That lease ended in 2025. The Obama Presidential Library staff, papers and artifacts are now in NARA facilities.