The planning work for the transfer of records to a remote off-site storage facility began with the signing of a contract with National Underground Storage (NUS) of Boyers, PA at the end of FY 1997. The contract represented a cooperative effort, led by Smithsonian Institution Archives, for shared space to house overflow records from many of the Institution's archives and libraries. Using specifications set by SIA, National Underground Storage created a facility within its complex of rooms carved out of limestone mine. The Smithsonian facility at NUS meets environmental standards for archives, provides for the timely retrieval of records as necessary, and offers approximately 30,000 cubic feet of additional space for the storage of records.

The bulk of the preparation and initial transfer work took place in fiscal year 1998. The Technical Services Division's Preservation Team led this effort. Team members prepared and shipped the first group of SIA records to NUS and assisted seven other Smithsonian repositories with their initial transfers. The SIA holdings prepared and shipped consisted primarily of the records of outside professional and scientific organizations; official Smithsonian records that had been microfilmed; a record set of SI publications; and high-value, low-use official SI records that did not contain any special media. The team oversaw shipments on November 19 and December 18, 1997, and on April 29, May 1, and May 26, 1998. The total volume of records shipped from SIA alone was 2,486.5 cubic feet, with 13 cubic feet withdrawn from consideration because of continuing reference use.

As work on the FY 1997 contract was concluding, SIA began planning for an estimated 1,000 cubic feet of records to be shipped under the FY 1998 contract. Although the Preservation Team had done the bulk of the work under the FY 1997 contract, future NUS work would be shared by the wider SIA staff. In a meeting on March 9, staff from the Archives, Institutional History, and Technical Services Divisions agreed on the division of labor necessary to move the process forward. As a first step, members of each of the four teams along with Pamela Henson of the Institutional History Division formed a Selection Committee to determine which collections could be sent to NUS. Other preparation steps identified in the meeting were then assigned to different teams. The steps included the selection of collections; administrative preparation to track collections as they moved through the process; preservation assessment and any necessary intervention; any necessary arrangement and description; and preparation of the boxes for shipment. The process was intended to minimize the amount of time that the collections would be unavailable for reference.

Between March and September 1998, members of the Selection Committee met ten times to choose records for NUS and to determine deadlines. The Committee developed a spreadsheet to monitor the progress of the records through the preparation process. Members of each team aided in preservation intervention, arrangement, and description of the records to keep the process on schedule. On November 18, 1998 the first group of records, totaling 847.5 cubic feet, was shipped under the FY 1998 contract.