CORRESPONDENCE: Letters from Constituents, 1983-1999

Summary: A large part of the duties of the Senator's office involved responding to constituent correspondence. Lautenberg received countless letters a year, and his office responded to each constituent's concerns. Letters would generally relate to current legislative proposals, to recently passed legislation, to the Senator's stated stance on issues, etc., but also to more personal requests for assistance. Once received by the office, the letters were sorted and given to legislative assistants based on their areas of interests; these areas are reflected in the subjects in which they were sorted. In some cases, these requests for assistance were considered case files (an individual request for funds or another action from the office), and so were discarded due to privacy concerns. A significant portion of constituent mail consisted of mass mailers, which are duplicates of a card or form-letter with different individuals' signatures and addresses.

For a brief period in the 1990s, Lautenberg's office designated letters without preplanned responses as Greens, or Ad-hocs. Due to the low number of the Greens, they are included as part of the Letters from Constituents subseries. Due to the much larger quantity of Blues/Response Letters, or letters of high priority. the latter are organized as their own subseries.

The Constituent Mail subseries also contains Letter Libraries. The Letter Libraries were a means for office staff to quickly respond to constituents' concerns, as they enabled the office to batch-respond to letters. The Libraries contain responses to prevalent issues and address constituents' various perspectives on those issues. Each of these response letters has an assigned code. Incoming letters from constituents would be given the appropriate response code, the response template would be adjusted where necessary, and then the letter sent out.

The office retained hard copies of all the constituent mail and also imaged these letters. Between 1983 and 1992 (bulk 1988 to 1992) constituent mail was microfilmed. Later on, the letters were also scanned and placed on CD-ROMs, DVDs, and/or hard drives.