Yorba Linda, Calif. ? On Saturday afternoons, brides and grooms exchange vows on the lawn just yards from the graves of former President Nixon and his wife, Pat.

It is the kind of commercialism that has helped pay the bills at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, the only presidential library without federal funding. But such small-time fund-raising may no longer be needed.

Three decades after the 37th president resigned in disgrace and the government seized his papers and tapes, a change in the law is sending the material home, transforming Nixon’s library from a private institution into a National Archives collection like the 11 other presidential libraries and making it eligible for millions of dollars in federal money.

Library officials are planning a new addition for the 46 million pages of records, 30,000 gifts and 3,700 hours of recordings, including the White House tapes that sealed Nixon’s downfall.

The transfer was made possible by language in a 2004 spending bill deleting a federal prohibition against removing Nixon’s papers and tapes from the Washington area.

Before Nixon, presidential papers belonged to the president, though every chief executive from Franklin Roosevelt on donated his to the government in exchange for a publicly supported library.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, lawmakers afraid that he would destroy documents necessary for the Watergate investigation passed a law giving the government possession of his papers and tapes. Four years later, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, abolishing private ownership of presidential papers.

It is expected to take until 2009 to transfer all Nixon’s records to the library 30 miles south of Los Angeles.

If it all happens as planned, the only president ever to resign will have the same status as his peers in at least one respect.

“In effect you have a library like every other library,” said Richard Norton Smith, former director of the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University and director of four presidential libraries.

“And for some people, Richard Nixon isn’t a president like every other president. So that’s the question that will be debated as long as there are people who lived through Watergate.”