The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Foundation for the National Archives has opened a new exhibition on its "Public Vaults," designed to educate the public on the breadth and depth of national documents available for exploration.

The 9,000-square-foot exhibition, free and open to the public at Constitution Avenue at 7th Street NW in Washington, D.C., features Dell systems equipped with interactive software, all disguised as a giant vault filled with boxes of records. Integrated within traditional case displays and mechanical interactive units, touch-screen monitors create the illusion that visitors actually are combing through the more than 1,000 historical archives. Visitors can, for example, hear congressional debates on Prohibition in 1918 and reinstating the draft in 1940. They can also see materials and evidence preserved from famous investigations, such as those on Unidentified Flying Objects, the Kennedy assassination, the Kent State shootings and Watergate.

Visitors also can translate documents, such as records from the Nuremberg Trials following World War II in their original German, to English instantly with the touch of a finger.

"We want as many people as possible to benefit from the National Archives, but with so many records and documents housed here, it's a challenge for visitors to know quite where to start," said John Carlin, Archivist of the United States. "The technology used in the Public Vaults enables us to give the public a taste of the breadth and depth of the Archives, and a fun, interactive way to navigate them."

NARA has plans to place some of these records on its Web site.