The Staff Files series consists of policy and operational papers created by many executive office staff. Materials include memoranda, correspondence, reports, agenda and minutes, legal briefs and decisions, press releases, clippings, and printed works. Files also contain items referred to as briefing, or issues, books. These chronological notebooks serve as the governor's briefing tool for establishing executive policy by compiling reports, correspondence, and memos that analyze priorities, provide background information, and recommend legislative/executive action.
Files are arranged by staff person rather than by office or subject and, therefore, do not readily accommodate research of a single topic. A subject approach to the series is further impeded by its size, 224 linear feet. Yet this series contains the bulk of the collection's topical materials. For example, Staff Files include rich source materials on economic growth and development, education, transportation, human services, women's rights, labor, minorities, urban affairs, PBB and toxic wastes, nuclear energy, and similar matters. Several techniques may prove helpful when doing research: Use Appendix A (Index to Staff Files) and Appendix B (Staff Listing); these general lists may provide some direction for searching. Search the Ellsworth/Frankland sequence first (see Research Strategy for Use). Refer to the subject files of Internal Memoranda and Correspondence. If your topic appears, note the staff member responsible, then search their files.
Several filing traits are distinctive to this series. Topical files, as commonly understood, include many formats of material, but are not characterized by singular runs of correspondence or memoranda. Within the Staff Files, subseries of correspondence or memoranda often have been placed within topical sequences, filed under 'C' or 'M' respectively. The staff materials, as a whole, were created between 1965 and 1982. Each subseries of staff member's papers have been individually dated within this time frame, but these dates are only approximate.
Of special note are the files of Isabella Saxton, head of Milliken's Communications Unit. These files include studies and recommendations on the reorganization of work in the offices responsible for citizen mail, summary mail counts, content analysis of letters received, and memoranda. Saxton's files also include ROBO responses to constituent correspondence; these machine-generated outgoing letters delineate the administration's positions on issues of the day.
The Early Program Material files, 1968-1973, are of import in that they document the early years of Milliken's tenure, before administrative reorganization. They include materials on human services and educational issues, records of the Executive Office, Programs and Policies, budgets, files on health, crime, economic opportunity, law enforcement and criminal justice, planning and youth, and state financing of local education.