Good Question

Looks like another few million dollars are about to be wasted:

• Once the Obama Presidential Center is constructed, it will have a children’s play garden, sledding hill, green spaces for picnics and outdoor gatherings, basketball courts and even a recording studio, officials have said.
  
  But what the space won’t have is all of former President Barack Obama’s manuscripts, documents, letters and gifts he collected during his time in office. While the Presidential Center is about four years from opening, a conversation has begun about what the facility will mean to scholars and to local research universities without those items.
  
  Traditionally, Presidential Libraries are places where historians, academics and college students travel to dig through paperwork and hold the first drafts of speeches, letters and legislation in their hands. But without those papers on site, some have begun to ask whether the Obama Center can even attract researchers to the University of Chicago, Chicago State University or the University of Illinois. What will it mean to have those documents online rather than in a physical form for inspection? And with digital technology constantly changing, how will the National Archives and Records Administration ensure the documents will be placed online in a timely manner and accessible over time?

Traditionally, a Presidential Library is built with donations and gifts, then the entire complex is "gifted" to the National Archives which maintains the facility itself. However, the exterior stuff - grounds, roads, parking, etc, is maintained by the municipality in which the Library resides.

Without the physical archives on site, we're imagining that the projected hundreds of thousands of visiting scholars will be less than hundreds of thousands and might drop into mere thousands. At first. Then drop off into hundreds as they can access the assorted paperwork online from the comfort of their homes and offices without braving the elements and criminal playground of Chicago.

And taxpayers will be saddled with yet another monstrosity that sucks up money.