“Choice” Magazine Names “Digital National Security Archive” an Outstanding Academic Title for 2018

Choice Magazine, the publishing arm of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), has named the Digital National Security Archive an “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2018.  The annual award goes to publications deemed especially worthy of attention from academic librarians seeking to build research collections.

The Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) is the Archive’s flagship publication series featuring declassified documents obtained through in-depth archival research and targeted requests under the Freedom of Information Act. It was launched in 1989 and includes 54 collections as of the end of 2018.  It is published by the academic publisher ProQuest.

Curated by foreign policy specialists with guidance from former officials and top academic experts, the materials are indexed by librarians using extensive item-level metadata and an in-house database of over 100,000 controlled authority terms.

Documentation consists of White House records, international summit meeting transcripts, top-level briefing papers, CIA assessments and covert action reports, military planning documents, State Department telegrams, and other high-level, previously classified materials resulting in what the Washington Journalism Review has called “a state-of-the-art index to history.”

Researchers can easily browse or search and identify specific records via multiple points of access (title, date, origin, destination, keyword, etc.), and go straight to facsimiles of the individual records.  Transcriptions of difficult-to-read items are provided, as are separate versions of materials that have been excised differently by government authorities at various times.

Topics range from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war on terrorism, Afghanistan to Iraq, Argentina to the Philippines, and presidential directives to military uses of space.

A sampling of DNSA’s most recent publications includes:

CIA Covert Operations, Part III: From Kennedy to Nixon

The third in the Archive’s unparalleled series of primary sources on the CIA’s dark side, curated by Pulitzer-nominated author John Prados, takes the story from the Bay of Pigs disaster into the most controversial secret programs of the Vietnam War such as the Operation Phoenix assassinations.

Soviet-U.S. Relations: The End of the Cold War, 1985-1991

This extraordinary collection includes declassified transcripts of every word the Soviet and American leaders actually said to each other in the historic summit meetings from Geneva 1985 through Moscow 1991, together with the previously secret preparatory and after-action reports from both the Russian and American sides.

Cuba and the U.S.: The Declassified History of Negotiations to Normalize Relations, 1959-2016

Over 1,700 high-level documents on more than 50 years of secret dialogue between the U. S. and Cuba. Based on years of research, this unique set reveals the hidden history of back-channel presidential diplomacy that led to the historic re-establishment of relations in 2015.

Targeting Iraq, Part I: Planning, Invasion, and Occupation, 1997-2004

2,000+ internal documents on one of the most significant U.S. foreign policy issues of our era.  Previously secret policy records from official U.S. and British sources encompass plans for regime change, war and occupation, and the controversy over weapons of mass destruction.