The staff has prepared various card indexes and guides to the collections, including its "Information for Visitors to the Operational Archives" used in writing this entry.
At the start of World War II, the Office of Naval Records and Library (a predecessor of the present Naval History Division) began to collect the reports, plans, and diaries that flowed into Washington from combat naval commands. The collection formed during that war is the core of the holdings of the operational archives; its primary coverage is from 1939 to the present, although there are limited materials from earlier periods as well. Among the Russian-related sources in the archives are the following:
The Naval History Division also has copies, bound and indexed, of the Oral Histories in the collection of the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis, Maryland. Relevant holdings are described in the entry for the Naval Institute.
