Tag: 23. Februar 2006

Society of American Archivists

Political Pressure and the Archival Record
Edited by Margaret Procter, Michael G. Cook and Caroline Williams.

The 20 essays in this volume resulted from an important international conference held in 2003 at the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies in the United Kingdom.
The contributors come from a breadth of disciplines (history, archives, the law, social and anthropological sciences) and from a wide-ranging geographical area (Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America).
Topics addressed include use of records as a tool of government; destruction of records as a political act; effects of corruption or ideology on the record; secrecy and accountability; and the nature and use of records resulting from repressive policies.

The book is now listed in the online SAA catalog.
http://www.archivists.org/catalog/

http://www.nytimes.com/
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The New York Times

February 21, 2006
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 —
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives’ open shelves.

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see also
The National Security Archive
declassification in reverse
and
SPIEGEL ONLINE English Site
and
The National Archives responds …