The National Security Archive

You may have heard about the CIA's 2006 program to reclassify unclassified documents at the National Archives. Did you know that some of the reclassified documents have been digitized and can be viewed on the Internet, along with documents about the reclassification program? The National Security Archives, located at, but not really part of, the George Washington University in DC, collects documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act and publishes them in book form, microfilm, CDRom and (selectively) on the Internet. The collections policy of the National Security Archive appears to be driven by an activist's passion for truth and justice, and also by a very specific user group. They find documents on domestic/foreign policy issues that investigative journalists and other researchers might be interested in. Their researchers also travel to other countries to retrieve copies of foreign government documents that are publicly available. Just a few of the many topics represented on the website, in addition to nefarious goings-on at NARA, are Kissinger's secret trip to China, the world's deadliest anthrax attack in Sverdlovsk, USSR and a Chilean plan to assassinate NY Mayor Ed Koch. They also have the Nixon and Elvis photos.

The "documents" in their online collection include text, images and audio files. All text documents can be viewed only as a PDF. Most of the documents are in black-and-white, but some are in color (Scooter Libby notes, letter from Elvis on American Airlines stationery) and they all look good. I'm not sure how many photos they have on the site (more about that later), but the Nixon/Elvis ones are taken from a contact sheet to create two little digital photo albums. You can select photos from thumbnail representations or navigate through the book using forward/back arrows. The largest group of audio files is from the Nixon tapes, which are echoey, hard to hear and full of background noise, no doubt like the originals. They play on QuickTime, and, I assume, also Windows Media Player. The Cuban Missile Crisis tapes, by contrast, only play on RealPlayer. The difference in format doesn't affect my ability to access the files but it would be nice to have some consistency.

The great irony of the National Security Archives website, because it is dedicated to freedom of information, is that it doesn't have a table of contents or index to the digital content, so it's hard to see what's on it. The digital material can only be accessed through links to a particular topic (or searching for an item), so the only way I can find more picture files is to laboriously click on each link and look through the list of digitized items related to that topic. I'm sure that this works great for their target audience, journalists or researchers who are looking for material on a specific story, like the reclassification of documents, and have a good idea of what they want. The Nixon tape files have a nice set of metadata accompanying them, with catalog number, time, location, participants, file size and a tape log (kind of like chapter markers) prepared by NARA. But I can't quickly and easily discern what other audio files are on the site and I can't get a listing of all digital items related to Nixon. I have a lot of respect for the archives staff who have made it their mission to go out and collect all of this material. But I feel like they could do more with providing access to the information they already have.