The Forgotten Room (2015) novel

Original Novel Title: The Forgotten Room
Author: Lincoln Child
Publisher: Doubleday, 2015.

Lincoln Child, who also has collaborated on a series of well-received novels with Douglas Preston, sets his sixth solo novel in the rareified world of a Rhode Island think tank known as Lux. The forgotten room of the title references a hidden room within the huge mansion that houses Lux, the former home of the eccentric and wealthy Edward Delaveaux whose wife's ghost was said to still haunt a hallway of Lux.

The forgotten room contains a secret which one Lux researcher has already paid for with his life in a grisly suicide. Jeremy Logan, a Yale University professor who moonlights as an enigmalogist by solving unexplainable mysteries such as the Loch Ness monster or ghosts, is hired by Lux's director to investigate this out-of-character suicide. In doing so, Logan places his own life in jeopardy.

Early on during his investigation on behalf of Lux's director, he visits the institute's archives, located as archives usually are, in the mansion's basement. The think tank does not provide him with maps or signage nor did it occur to him to ask, so he has to find the archives on his own, where he eventually

"arrived at an open door with a sign that read ARCHIVES. Beyond the door, the walls and ceiling fell away, revealing a most impressive space bathed in bright yet pleasingly mellow light. Row after row of filing cabinets ran from front to back in achingly regular lines, but they were spaced far enough apart to forestall any sense of oppressiveness. At the far end, Logan could just make out another, smaller door, with what looked like a security station beside it. He stepped inside. ...

"Just inside the door, an elderly woman was seated at an official-looking table. A nameplate on one side of the desk read J. RAMANUJAN. She ran her eyes up and down Logan, lips pursing with an expression he could not decide was appraising or disapproving." (p. 78-79)

He's initially denied access because he has only a temporary ID card. He quickly overturns the archivist's decision with a letter the director provided him entitling him to unrestricted access. Not knowing exactly what he's looking for other than files pertaining to the 1930s, the archivist provides him with "blank document requisition forms." (p. 79)

After some discussion over the nature of his archival research and request to look for documents himself in the stacks, the archivist reluctantly agrees with the caveat that he "take no more than five folders from the stacks at a time. And please be careful when you refile them." (p. 80)

He spends a total of three hours at this research, "scribbling his observations into a small notebook with a gold pen," and realizes in the end that the files do not contain any records more recent than 2000 even though he was only interested in files from the 1930s. (p. 81)

The archivist informs him that more recent records are either with the scientists themselves or "'in archive two, beyond that door.' And she pointed toward the far end of the room." Archive two turns out to be off-limits to Logan even with his special letter of access. Seems he required "a level-A access or greater" according to the security guard who's armed with a nightstick and a can of Mace. "Then he [Logan] nodded, turned, and made his way back through the stacks and into the basement corridor beyond." (p. 81-82)

So the main archive stacks have no security other the guard who's at one end and who's purpose is guard against intruders to archive two. Filing cabinets for storage are so 1970s. Any archives worth its upkeep would more than likely not permit the use of pens to take notes. At least the part about the archives being relegated to a basement seems to accord with the location of many archival facilities with which I'm familiar.

The Thieves of Darkness (2010) novel

According to the dustjacket of Richard Doetsch's 2010 novel The Thieves of Darkness: A Thriller, "reformed master thief" Michael St. Pierre helps an imprisoned friend in a quest to find "a map containing the location of a holy place lost to the mists of time, a repository of knowledge and treasure predating Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."

The Book of Air and Shadows

Original title: The Book of Air and Shadows
Author: Gruber, Michael
Publisher: New York, NY: William Morrow, 2007 (hardcover)
This thriller features an intellectual property lawyer, a cache of 17th century letters and a previously unknown
literary work by William Shakespeare. This novel bears comparison with What Time Devours (2009), a thriller by A.J. Hartley.

Codex 632

Original title: Codex 632: The Secret Identity of Christopher Columbus: A Novel
Author: Santos, José Rodrigues dos; translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin.
Publisher: New York: William Morrow, 2008.
First published in Portugal in 2005 as O Codex 632, this novel references several archives and historical manuscripts, all of which the author assure us, exist, including Codex 632 of the title. The author attempts to solve the mystery of Christopher Columbus' true identity. Unfortunately, the book reads more like a journalistic expose than a novel. I only managed to finish it because I wanted to read all the references to archives.

The Book Of God And Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery

Original Title: The Book Of God And Physics: A Novel of the Voynich Mystery
Author: Enrique Joven
Publisher: William Morrow, May 5, 2009 (hardcover)
Considered the world's most mysterious manuscript, the Voynich Manuscript, named after its discoverer, is the subject of at least three novels published early in the first decade of the 21st century. The manuscript is preserved in  Yale University's Beinecke Library.

The Lost Symbol

Original Novel Title: The Lost Symbol
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: New York: Doubleday, September 15, 2009

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Given that Brown returns to familiar ground with his heroic professor Robert Langdon from Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, I think it's safe to assume that this novel will contain references to museums and archives.

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Archangel

Original Novel Title: Archangel
Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: London, UK: Hutchison, 1998 ; New York, NY: Random House, February 1999.
Harris, author of the novels Fatherland and Enigma, sets this novel in modern Russia where a one-hit wonder historian, Dr. Christopher Richard Andrew "Fluke" Kelso, is in search of a secret notebook kept by Josef Stalin. Russian archives and archivists play a starring role in the novel, so much so that this work could represent the Great Archival Novel of the 1990s.
Quotations are from the British hardcover edition:
Kelso, addressing a conference, "Confronting the Past": An International Symposium on the Archives of the Russian Federation", paints a grim picture of Stalin's personal life unaccounted for in any archives (p. 69-70):

Colleagues, whenever I sit in an archive, or, more rarely these days, attend a symposium like this one, I always try to remember that scene, because it reminds me to be wary of imposing a rational structure on the past. There is nothing in the archives here to show us that the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, when they made their decisions, were shattered by exhaustion, and very probably terrified -- that they had been up until three a.m. dancing for their lives, and knew they might well be dancing again that evening. ...

Here we are, gathered in Moscow, forty-five years after Stalin's death, to discuss the newly-opened archives of the Soviet era. Above our heads, in fire-proofed strong-rooms, maintained at a constant temperature of eighteen degrees celsius and sixty per cent humidity, are one and a half million files -- the entire archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yet how much does this archive really tell us about Stalin?

A former hardline Communist Party and KGB member, Vladimir Mamantov, acidly comments to Fluke on how some Russians view the opening of the Russian Archives and its exploitation by historians (p. 73):

"So you're part of the gathering of thieves,' he said to Kelso.

"What?'

"The symposium. Pravda published a list of the foreign historians they invited to speak.Your name was on it."

"Historians are hardly thieves, Comrade Mamantov. Even foreign historians."

"No? Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands. Ours has been stolen from us -- gouged and blackened by the libels of our enemies until the people have become lost."

Kelso smiled. Mamantov hadn't changed at all. "You can't seriously believe that."

"You're not Russian. Imagine if your country offered to sell its national archive to a foreign power for a miserable few million dollars."

"You're not selling your archive. The plan is to microfilm the records and make them available to scholars."

"To scholars in California," said Mamantov, as if this settled the argument. ...

The Tenth Directorate (pp. 107) is the shorthand form for the Special Federal Archive Resource Bureau, "or whatever the Squirrels had decided to call themselves that particular week" wryly notes one Russian investigator of Fluke's discovery. (p. 133).
The Tenth Directorate records room is maintained by one (p. 134, 136)

Blok -- an ageless creature, stooped and dusty, with a bunch of keys on his belt -- [who] led him [Feliks Suvorin] into the depths of the building, then out into a dark, wet courtyard and across it and into what looked like a small fortress. Up the stairs to the second floor: a small room, a desk, a chair, a wood-block floor, barred windows. ...

He had been expecting one file, maybe two. Instead, Blok threw open the door and wheeled in a steel trolley stacked with folders -- twenty or thirty of them -- some so old that when he lost control of the heavy contraption and collided with the wall, they sent up protesting clouds of dust. ...

He couldn't read them all. It would have taken him a month. He confined himself to untying the ribbon from each bundle, riffling through the torn and brittle pages to see if they contained anything of interest, then tying them up again. It was filthy work. His hands turned black. The spores invaded the membrane of his nose and made his head ache.

In another extract from Kelso's speech before conference delegates he pessimistically assesses the worth of the Russian archives (p. 156-157):

And the opening of the archive? "Confronting the past"? Come, ladies and gentlemen, let us say frankly what we all know to be the case. That the Russian government today is scared, and that it is actually harder to gain access to the archives now than it was six or seven years ago. You all know the facts as well as I do. Beria's files: closed. The Politsburo's files: closed. Stalin's files -- the real files, I mean, not the window dressing on offer here: closed.

In the town of Archangel, to which the notebook about, not by Stalin, led Kelso and a reporter who intruded into the hunt, the men bribe a Communist Party official to let them see the Party archives. The scene is once again rather dismal and almost pathetic from Kelso's perspective (p. 276):

The Russian conducted them back along the passage and into reception. The woman with the dyed blonde hair was watering her tinned plants. Aurora still proclaimed that violence was inevitable. Zyuganov's fat smile remained in place. Tsarev collected a key from a metal cupboard and they followed him down two flights of stairs into the basement. A big, blast-proof iron door, studded with bolts, thickly painted a battleship grey, swung open to show a cellar, lined with wooden shelving, piled with files.

Tsarev put on a pair of heavy-framed spectacles and began pulling down dusty folders of documents while Kelso looked around with wonder. This was not a storeroom, he thought. This was a catacomb, a necropolis. Busts of Lenin, and of Marx and Engels, crowded the shelves like perfect clones. There were boxes of photographs of forgotten Party apparatchiks and stacked canvases of socialist realism, depicting bosomy peasant girls and worker-heroes with granite muscles. There were sacks of decorations, diplomas, membership cards, leaflets, pamphlets, books. ...

The tension that exists between the historian and the archivist is well portrayed in this novel. This conflict, driven by the desire of both parties to possess history, is molded and manipulated to an evil end by Mamantov.

The Da Vinci Code

Original Novel Title: The Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: New York: Doubleday, 2003
Despite being hammered by critics for its writing, this novel has attained a cult status with electronic and print pro-, anti- and guides to the Da Vinci Code. Lewis Perdue published a similarly titled novel in 1983, then a second one about Mary Magdalene in 2000. Brown's novel, as Perdue points out on his Ideaworx site, bears some similarities in character and plot development to these two novels. Having read Perdue's highly forgettable The Da Vinci Legacy, I can't say I'm convinced Perdue's plagarism case would stand up in court. See also The Novels of Lewis Perdue and Angels and Demons.