It's the Obama Center, Not Library. Here's Why

Matt Vespa | December 15, 2025 6:30 AM

Well, it’s going to happen. He’s a former president of the United States; he gets a library. Yet, you shouldn’t call it that. Recently, Barack Obama tweeted about plans for his “center,” a word some found strange. In 2019, even The New York Times touched upon this, adding that you shouldn’t call Obama’s future library…a library. Why? Well, the Obamas didn’t want the National Archives and Records Administration running the show on documentation:

Chicago is where Michelle was raised, where I got my start as an organizer, and where we built a family together. When the Obama Presidential Center opens next June, it will be our way to give back to a city that has given us so much. pic.twitter.com/DpIUDtyMpP
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 10, 2025

"Obama privatized the archive and does not allow the National Archives and Records Admin to run it."

Weird! Is that weird? I feel like that's weird and maybe journalists should be looking into why that is! https://t.co/drOeRClZaM
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) December 12, 2025

So on brand that the Obama library doesn’t actually have a library https://t.co/Cc7mjcWSwX
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 11, 2025

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.
But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.
In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.
And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.
[…]
But as awareness of the plan has spread, some historians see a threat to future scholarship on the Obama administration — and to the presidential library system itself.
Without a dedicated repository, they argue, the rich constellations of related material found at the other libraries — papers donated by family members, cabinet members and aides, as well as pre-presidential and personal papers — could end up scattered, or even uncollected. And without help from specialized archivists, the promised digital democratization could just as easily turn into a hard-to-navigate data dump.