When the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library opens near Simi Valley in November, not one sheet of its 54 million pages of White House documents will be available for public scrutiny.

By law, archivists have until 1994 before they must consider requests to see any of the library's storehouse of presidential records--the largest collection of White House documents ever assembled.

In addition, Reagan has placed a 12-year legal restriction on several categories of White House records, including those detailing confidential advice he received during his presidency. Documents about foreign affairs or national security, including undisclosed details about the Iran-Contra affair, may remain shielded from public view for a generation or more under an executive order signed by Reagan when he was in office.

Restrictions are not new to presidential records. Shortly before the opening of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda last July, the library's director created a stir by suggesting that researchers and scholars would be screened on the basis of the content and slant of their work. He later backed down.

Reagan's presidential papers, however, are the first to be made public property under a 1978 law that evolved out of a bitter clash between Nixon and Congress over control of his White House records. The rules allow so many restrictions on the release of documents that some historians criticize the law as more concerned about presidential privacy than public interest.

"The hope is that it (the papers) will take so long to come out, that nobody would care anymore," said Warren I. Cohen, a history professor at Michigan State University and a leading critic of restrictions on official records. "The really important papers are not going to be available for quite a long time."

While Reagan's papers will be restricted in the initial years, library visitors will have access to exhibits in a museum being installed in the building at the direction of Reagan and a close circle of friends and advisers.

"The exhibit will be a visual biography of President Reagan's life," said Bill Garber, Reagan's spokesman. "It will include all of the important events of his life and presidency."

But historians often dismiss presidential museums as a glorification of their namesakes with little research value. They suggest that the Reagan Library will not blossom into a center for historical research until well-guarded papers begin to emerge sometime after the turn of the century.