An Integrated Online Archive for International History

Enhancing access to declassified governmental and other organizational records by aggregating documents from the Wilson Center Digital Archive, the Archives and Records Management Section of the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Archives, and the World Bank Group Archives. The project would make the records available for research on an existing website, the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive), as well as through library catalog systems and an application programming interface. International, multiarchival research has dramatically increased the scope and sophistication of studies on contemporary world politics. But resource constraints and the increasingly obvious pitfalls of scholarship by search engine require novel approaches. We seek NEH support to internationalize the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive), which is already the world's largest database of declassified documents. The addition of the UN, NATO, World Bank, and Wilson Center digital archives will expand its geographical scope and temporal range, supporting both new international histories of the Cold War era as well as transnational and global histories of post-Cold War challenges. By harnessing data science tools, we will be able to extract or generate descriptive metadata and make them discoverable through multiple interfaces tailored to distinct research communities, including a user-friendly website, an Application Programming Interface, and Columbia Libraries' online catalog.