Before Clinton, 11 presidents built libraries to preserve and polish legacies.

The article informs that former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started it all with a sketch in 1937 of a tasteful Dutch Colonial-style building to house his presidential papers. Over the next three years, he erected the small library in Hyde Park, New York, following his own design and using Hudson Valley fieldstone for the exterior walls and small dormers in the sharply pitched roof. Today, there are 12 presidential libraries, 11 of which are run by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Typically, a president sets up a private foundation that builds his library, then hands it over to NARA to operate.