The archive contains selected transcriptions and derived categories. This page preserves review notes from May 12, 2026, with clarifications for the current public exports. References to private workbooks and older generated files remain for context; they do not imply that those files are included here.
Reading-room dates are parsed from research documents. Report ranges can be inconsistent, and biographical records can include dates extracted from citations or headings. Check the cited sources before treating these as verified chronologies. Report text includes both research summaries and excerpts.
Counts below describe the saved public exports. See the
archive guide for dates and source files.
Run python3 validate_data.py in the repository to check their
consistency; this does not validate transcription against the original reports.
| Claim | Earlier claim | Review value | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total proposals reviewed | 1,691 | 1,691 | match |
| Total line-item allotments | 1,382 | 1,144 | corrected |
| Technologies in review timeline | 202 | 202 | match |
| Annual congressional appropriations | 33 | 33 | match |
| Total Board appropriations (sum) | — | $3,731,000 | recorded |
| Total allotted to projects (sum) | — | $4,398,440 | recorded |
The proposal records come from nine annual "Subjects Considered" tables transcribed from BOF annual reports. Several reports have structural gaps in the original transcriptions.
The public export has no recorded action for 780 rows from the 1903–04 through 1907–08 source files, plus one row from 1897–98. These records do not establish the Board's decision.
Missing actions are grouped as Other in the current export and dashboard. Other also includes non-empty actions that did not match a rule. Neither group should be interpreted as a rejection or an approval.
The nine transcribed "Subjects Considered" tables cover AR #8 through AR #18, but reports #10 and #13 are missing from the source archive. There are no rows for those years in the proposal corpus. The financial ledger (allotments and appropriations) does cover them.
Every row in the 1907–08 source spreadsheet has BOF.AR.10.1907-1908
in the report-number column. Annual Report #10 corresponds to FY1899–1900;
the correct value for 1907–08 is AR #20. This is a transcription typo in
the upstream Excel file, not the pipeline.
The 1905–06 source rows have BOF.AR.16 without a year suffix.
All 133 remain undated in the current public export. They are available in
the record list when undated records are included, but are excluded from the
year chart. Assigning dates would require checking the source reports.
Three rows have no subject text in the public export. They remain in its record count. Their presence does not establish three identifiable proposals; the source rows need review before they can be interpreted or removed.
The 1920 row records the Board's dissolution: a zero-dollar entry noting that $230,000 of unspent prior appropriations was returned to the Treasury. It's kept as a marker for the Board's wind-down rather than dropped.
Headline copy refers to a 1865–1920 range; the underlying ledger's earliest data point is FY1866 (Army) / FY1866 (Navy). The 1865 fiscal year has no row because the original Statistical Abstract entry for that year is missing.
The Board functionally stopped issuing new project allotments after 1918. Filename retains the 1919 boundary for symmetry with the appropriations file; no rows exist for 1919.