From Classified to Collections: How the National Security Archive Transforms Government Secrets into Research Resources
Sponsored by Clarivate
Recorded on 03/27/2025Posted in Primary Sources and Special Collections
Learn how declassified government documents enhance academic research and primary source collections.
Access the presentation slides.
Summary:
Every academic librarian knows the challenge: researchers need authoritative primary sources they can trust completely. Join Tom Blanton, Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, as he opens the vault on declassified documents that transform how students and faculty understand history. See how these materials – from presidential decision memos to intelligence reports – provide the hard evidence researchers need to validate their work.
In this session discover how to:
- Give your researchers unfiltered access to the actual documents behind major historical decisions and events
- Provide faculty with compelling primary sources that bring history alive in the classroom
- Help students develop critical thinking skills by working with authentic government documents
- Build library collections that support rigorous, evidence-based research across disciplines
Learn how these declassified materials help your library meet its core mission: providing researchers with indisputable documentary evidence. Essential for academic libraries committed to supporting scholarly rigor in an age of information uncertainty.
Speaker:
Tom Blanton
Director
National Security Archive
George Washington University
Tom Blanton is the director since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). He won the 2004 Emmy Award for individual achievement in news and documentary research, and on behalf of the Archive received the George Polk Award in 2000 for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy.” His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association’s James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors. The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.” His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive’s online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive’s more than 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.
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About the National Security Archive
Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents (“the world’s largest nongovernmental collection” according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.
