I love the concept of a private entity running the presidential liebury and museum; the problem would be if they actually wanted to display objects from the presidency, those aren’t theirs to own. It’s the public’s property.
But considering how this is playing out, I’m sure that the Obama’s think that it’s all theirs to do as they please.
The ‘Obama Presidential Library’ is not even a real library, in sense of preserving and making available to the public the documents from the Obama White House. As you rightly point out, these documents belong to the public and cannot be simply given to a private entity.
Instead it will only make available ‘electronic’ copies of ‘selected documents’. There is no guarantee that these copies will be complete or even accurate. It also begs the question of why even bother to have a physical location if everything is going to be offered only electronically anyway. Why not just put up the Obama Presidential Website?
The real reason becomes clear with the reveal of the overall plan and its half billion dollar construction budget and the building’s huge size as a Soviet style monolith, and how it will be used to train young activists in community organizing and all of Obama’s other favorite shibboleths. (That level of overt political partisan activism is probably not allowed using public library funds.)
In short, this will be a monument to Obama the Man, not the Obama White House.