While President Bush was moving out of the White House hours before the Inaugural address of President Barack Obama, SMU was also naming Alan C. Lowe director of the Bush Library.

The veteran of presidential library planning said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News that he sees collaboration between the archives museum part of the library as well as the planned public policy center.

The decision, according to the Dallas Morning News, was mutual between the National Archives and George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

Lowe is a 14-year veteran with the National Archives and has spent the last six years as the founding director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Lowe has been appointed as director of the $300 million library complex set to open in 2013. He will head the library museum and the Bush Foundation will run the policy center.

“Alan is a talented and experienced professional and will be an outstanding director of the library,” President George W. Bush said in a White House statement. “We look forward to working with him and the National Archives to build a world-class presidential library and museum that will be an important resource for scholars and the general public.”

The massive record content that will be filling the museum will be a task for Lowe to handle. According to the Dallas Morning News, two cargo planes and 14 tractor tractor-trailers full of records were put into storage for use after the library’s completion.

“One of my core beliefs is the records speak,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “The Bush library will allow people to come in and dig into the records of the past several years. Generations will decide. As they say, it was an administration of great consequence.”