 Welcome. My name is Andrea Matney, and I am the coordinator for the Know Your Records program. Know Your Records is an information program to tell you how to access research at the U.S. National Archives and the U.S. federal governments that are held here. Today's presentation is entitled National Declassification Center, Releasing All We Can, Protecting What We Must. In recognition of Sunshine Week, our panel is discussing the National Declassification Center's mission to align people, processes, and technologies to advance the declassification and public release of historically valuable permanent records while maintaining national security. Before we begin, our panel discussion, I have several tips for you. For our theater audience, please hold your questions until the end and use the microphones in the aisles. For our online YouTube audience, you can also ask questions by logging in, and you can also chat and ask questions from there. You'll also find links to captioning, the presentation slides, and the event evaluation. I am now turning the program over to the director of the National Declassification Center, William Fisher. Bill? I'm very happy to be here today celebrating Sunshine Week with my colleagues in the NDC, as well as all of you. The NDC plays a crucial role in the overall government-wide declassification efforts, as well as at NARA, and it's just really exciting to be here to participate in this. I haven't been at the National Declassification Center for very long, a little over a month. However, I do have 20 years' worth of experience in federal archives, records management, and information access. To provide a little context for this, I would also like to point out at the outset that the mission of the National Archives is to provide public access to the historically valuable records of the U.S. federal government. And NARA's National Archives' top strategic goal is to make access happen. Now this is important to consider because the National Declassification Center plays a key role in supporting the agency's mission and making access happen. And today, my colleagues are going to share with you the inner workings of this process, how it works at the National Declassification Center from beginning to end, getting a view of the full life cycle of the declassification function at the National Archives. I have two slides for my overview, and I'll go to the first one here, which is the organization chart for the National Declassification Center. I'm not going to spend any time on this. This is available for your reference. You can consult it afterward. It's important to understand this in the sense that it provides the major program areas that my colleagues here represent, and they will speak to their piece of this and their role in the organization. And then the second slide that we have available for you to consult, and these are available online, is a high level process map. This is important so that if you're trying to understand how do all these pieces fit together, you're able to consult this process map and understand this full life cycle approach to these records from the point when they're accessioned into the National Archives and until we make them available in the open stacks for researchers or if we must continue to withhold them for some sort of national security reason. And my colleagues here will be talking about their piece of this process, and these two initial slides will give you an idea of how these pieces come together if you need that visual. With that, I'd like to turn this over to our first speaker who will be talking about her division and her part in the process. Please help me welcome Madeleine Proctor. Thank you, Bill. Hello, everyone. First of all, who are we? We are the first office in the NDC to work on the records. Paper or textual is what we work on. We consist of 10 staff, 6 archivists, 4 archive specialists, and me. We make sure all of the boxes that came in into the building, into Archives 2, are theoretically ready to work on and are on the shelves at the stated locations. We create electronic projects and physical project folders to track the work. Then, when all of this is completed, our work begins with our agency partners and at times with other parts of the NDC. Eval, revaluation. We work with our agency partners performing a 20% sample on the records to check for accuracy for equity recognition. That all equities were tabbed, identified. A sample is performed on the records that were reviewed by the originating agency. KET, KET is a 100% review on the records. These records were not reviewed by the originating agency. As with evaluation, this work is performed with our agency partners. PAIR, I'll talk about a little bit. PAIR is a re-review of our older projects that we have. Special projects, we work with other NARA offices to make these projects happen so that the information is made available in NARA's online catalog. We also have a metric staff in the NDC and I and my staff work with them to track our work and the work with metric staff to ensure that, one, the work is tracked and it's tracked accurately. We also are responsible for preservation activities within the NDC which we are assisted by NARA's preservation office and this involves re-boxing if needed, mold issues, training on how to handle the records for our staff and our agency partners and other things like that. The big difference between evaluation and KET is the sampling process. Again, evaluation is sampled and KET is not. Our work plan varies each year based on the amount of records that came into NARA, classified records. When records come in, we put them on our work plan for either evaluation or KET for the following year. As the slide shows, the amount of pages worked each year does change. The other important piece here is that all of this work that we do with evaluation and KET and our agency partners assist the NDC FOIA staff to help reduce their workload. Pair. Pair, again, is the re-review of documents that were withdrawn between 1973 and 2001 with a total of 7,717 projects, estimated to be about 6 million pages. For this process, staff and, again, our agency partners to re-review all of the documents to find out if they still need to be protected, still need to be classified. It is very time consuming, not just the re-review, but getting the updated information for each project into the database, correcting information when needed, and counting the pages so that we have an accurate page count of the work. Previously, the policy was to estimate the number of pages, something we do not do for Pair. And, of course, refiling the now declassified documents into the unclassified stacks with the rest of the series that they belong to. Special projects. We work on some special projects throughout the year, or years, I should say. The requests can come from the NSE, and here are some examples that we've done in the past. These are two more examples. For these two special projects, the staff who worked for me during their regular work found interesting documents and wanted to create special projects for them, and they really had a great time on doing both of these. And the last two I'm mentioning here, we try to commemorate historical events, and here are two examples that we've also done over the past couple of years. Now, what happens to the records after our staff has completed them? Well, Melissa Whitney, I'm going to talk to you about processing and release. So, the division is actually the largest division in the NDC. We have 30 employees, and we range from archives technicians, archives specialists, we have archives leads, we have two branch chiefs, and myself. We also have the Interagency Referral Center, which falls within this division, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. In the IRC, we have approximately 200 agency partners who spend time in the IRC to do their piece of the puzzle. And last, we have the release branch, and release is responsible for making sure that the records, once they have been declassified, actually go out so all of you can spend some time researching them. So, specifically, what do each of those groups do? So, Madeleine explained that her group will capture the records when they come in the door, and then they will make sure that the equities are identified. So, at this point, we have a box of records with a few documents or many documents that are identified. All of those records then come to our indexing department. And the indexers will take this material, they will segregate out what is, what is tabbed as classified and what is not classified, what is ready to go out to the public. And they will index, which is due data entry, on every single document. We really spend a lot of time making sure that the metadata for every single document is accurate and thorough. And we're going to track that document throughout the entire rest of the process. And after that, then it goes to quality control. Once again, we double check again to make sure that everything was accurate. At this point, the classified material will go to the Interagency Referral Center. In the referral center, the IRC, the agency partners use their expertise in identifying material, bits of information that need to stay classified, and they'll make the decisions of what needs to be held for a time and what can be released. So, we have the material that's been released and we have the original box of material that was never classified. And all of that then gets out through the release department. And they will also do one final check to make sure that nothing was missed. It is not in our best interest or yours to let any classified material out before its time. So, we've done three checks on the material. And then it's there for you to research and write your material, write your books to give you an example of how much material goes through the indexing. Last year, we did just under 22 million pages. This year, we're already on track to do almost 30 million pages. It is quite an accomplishment for this staff. The IRC, the agency partners, they've pushed through just over two million pages of documents. And they have to read every single word in these documents. So, it is quite an accomplishment. And then released, we moved 5,800 boxes this year. And again, we're on track to do much more than that. There are things, this is only the textual side. There is also special media. And Carrie McStay is going to talk to you about that. Good afternoon. My name is Carrie McStay and I'm the Supervisory Archivist for the NDC's Special Media and Electronic Records Branch. We are a new unit established in mid-November 2018. So, it helps to pose the question, where did we come from? The NDC has been considering special media for a number of years with two dedicated staffers creating and fostering a program for classified special media as part of Melesa's Processing and Release Division. A dedicated branch was constructed with the transitioning of five staff from the Nixon Presidential Libraries Tapes Team, the two original staff members, and two additional internal reassignments. We engage with a diverse range of media formats with a slight caveat that some formats that are not machine-dependent, typically maps, photographic prints, and negatives, may remain with paper workflows. Here I have a listing of including some examples of formats that we work with. How do we receive special media? How does it come to our branch? Some special media is found interfiled in textual records. Depending on where it is discovered in the NDC's workflow, we are notified by the CAT evaluation team or by pulling up a report once it has been indexed. There are also discrete series, collections, or items of special media held by non-textual, narrow custodial units, or presidential libraries. Some specific examples. Complexity with special media also derives from the requirement for a piece of technology to review the information. With special media, we may need to assess the condition of an item, possibly treat an item, locate a piece of technology to playback the item, and consider reformatting the item for both preservation and access purposes. So here I've shown some equipment, an audio cassette, a VHS player, a motion picture film playback deck, a slide carousel, and a microfiche reader. In this era, reformatting is expressed as digitization. Machine dependence and the need to reformat is what makes special media unique. And here I gave just a couple of examples of some of the sort of reformatting techniques we have, including a scanner and a digital camera for still images, a reel-to-reel player, a eumatic player, and a microfilm digitizer. Fundamentally, special media declassification follows similar essential steps as paper declass. So in preparing items or series for review, like with paper, one may make a database record for project tracking or generate forms or what have you. At this point in the process is where we typically engage with the technology and reformatting piece as well. Of note, though, we may not have established processes across government, as is the case with the Nixon White House tapes classified audio review, we have had to create a process. Coordinating agency review remains very similar to paper processes, but the NDC making efforts to get content to an agency, as well as on-site coordination with agencies visiting or working at the National Archives. In the case of the tapes, we have tended to invite agencies for review. We can assure them as seamless as possible audio experience and avoid sending an audio CD to an agency office that may face challenges in being able to address special media. After agency review, there's what I'm going to refer to as post-processing. While I find this word a little archivally in artful, I'm opting to choose a word with a sort of film, TV, music production slant to again highlight the technological aspect of special media. Once we have an agency decision, we may need to edit the items or redact, as in the case of FOIAs and tapes review. We also may need to insert placards at the beginning and end of items to indicate it is declassified. We have to create new files, perform quality control checks of a final product, and complete other procedures such as NDC indexing or revising finding aids in the case of the nicks and tapes. Again, though, archival staff performing paper processes also perform significant work to execute agency decisions and prepare documents for access, as Melissa demonstrated. Lastly, we notify the custodial unit of work completed and provide final product where necessary. To end, I want to highlight where we are headed. It's exciting for us. It's a period of growth, especially on the technical end. Previous years saw NDC special media staff coordinate reformatting within the National Archives but outside of the NDC. We anticipate internally increasing our capacity to reformat as well as engage in all manner of post-processing work I indicated earlier. Our tapes experience has given us a profound amount of audio experience. Currently, we are poised to advance our skill set and capacity significantly with microfilm and video. Additionally, we will foster our relationships within NARA to help us gain expertise with motion picture film, audio and video physical preservation aspects and still images. And, of course, we will work with our colleagues in NDC's FOIA division as well as with custodial unit partners such as Research Services Special Media Division and the Presidential Libraries. Since we do so much digitization, I see some of the declassified AV product we create as a place where we can explore digital delivery to the custodial unit via NARA's electronic records archive. So rather than provide a DVD of a declassified video from the 1990s, we will provide a high quality digital file via NARA's electronic records archive. From there, the custodial unit can work to provide a public access. We will continue with our comprehensive digitization for preservation and access for the Nixon White House tapes, working to re-review the remaining 774 hours of withheld content, including 37 hours of classified content. We have achieved a complete digital transfer of all 4,042 reels representing 3,432 hours of audio. The ultimate goal will be 23,000-plus conversations from the lowliest coffee order to robust head-of-state conversations available online. Finally, executing our complete and comprehensive digital tapes project that includes an entire declassification process has given a significant experience and insight into complex processing in an all-digital environment. Microfilm and moving image review and redaction offer us further depth of experience. We see a natural pivot from complex analog to digital special media projects to processing born digital records. I'd like now to introduce my colleague Don McElwain to discuss the FOIA and MDR division. Thanks, Carrie. Again, I'm Don McElwain. I am the director of the Classified Freedom of Information and Mandatory Declassification Review Division within the National Declassification Center. I think I need to move this one forward. Or maybe if I hit this one. This one. There we go. There we go. Yes, that's me. So we're going to move on to the next slide. So who are we? We're the division that handles FOIAs, mandatories, and other access-to-man declassification requests for classified records that have been accessioned into the National Archives. My staff consists of me, a very strong, very good deputy, four lead archive specialists who basically run the various teams that I'll talk about in just a minute, and then we've got archive specialists. Right now I've got three vacancies and nine very hard-working, very good archive specialists that process your requests for under the FOIA and under MDR. So what do we do? Well, somewhat logically, we process requests under the Freedom of Information Act, and I've just got the legal sites there. We also process mandatory declassification review requests, which are requests for declassification under the executive order. We also do special access review. We assist our colleagues in the special access and FOIA division and research services. We occasionally help out with the special projects that Madeleine talked about, and I'll talk a little bit more about indexing on demand, which is a way for the public, for you guys out there, to help us determine what goes to the front of the line. We also work with our colleagues at the various agencies to help us process these requests, to tell us, you know, this needs to be redacted. Everything on this three-page document, except this one paragraph, can be released. And here's why we need to hold that. We always push back and ask agencies to not just say, well, you got to hold it. You need to tell us why it's got to be held so we can communicate and go back to the researcher and say, you know, we've got to hold this because it's an intelligence method or it could reveal, you know, a relationship between us and another country or it deals with, you know, nuclear information. So I think it helps for us to be able to tell that requester, that researcher, you know, here's why we're holding it. We're not making this up. We have solid reasons. We send information. We send these requested documents out to the agencies. They come back. My staff prepares the redacted versions of the documents when there needs to be redactions. Our goal, again, from the beginning, is to release as much as we possibly can and when we can't release it to protect what we must. And then, in both the FOIA and in the mandatory process, the researcher, if he or she doesn't like the decision they've gotten, they have the right to appeal it and we manage the appeals process working with the archivist and the deputy archivist to make sure that that researcher gets a second set of eyes, a second look to see if we can release even more. So you may have gathered by now that the National Declassification Center is really a big system. We work together. We work on different levels. What my three colleagues here, particularly Madeline and Melissa, do is they work on the front end of the house. They are looking at from a larger level in the system and they're reviewing and working with our agency partners at a document level to pass or fail specific documents and as a result of their work, a lot gets released and that stuff that doesn't get released, those records are then segregated and indexed as Melissa described and that allows a researcher to file a FOIA or a mandatory for specific withdrawn documents. I can remember before we had a robust system in place, a researcher might come in and just say, well, I heard that you've got this 10 box series accession but it hasn't been through a process. There's been no quality control. I'm just going to request the whole 10 boxes under the Freedom of Information Act. Now, because of the systems we have in place, the work that my colleagues have done, that researcher can come into the open research room, look through those 10 boxes where 80, 90, 70% of the materials have been released and file a FOIA or a mandatory on those specific withdrawn items. So it makes my life easier and let's face it, it makes it easier for the researcher because that researcher is already starting out at 70, 80 or even 90%. So building on the work of my colleagues, my shop takes that and is able to refine it, able to benefit greatly from what my colleagues have already done. And so I like to point out that we start out big and as a result of starting out big, we release big and then what's left, we can do below the document level review and it's very small. I also like to point out that every time somebody requests information, whether it's an indexing on-demand project, we'll talk about that in a minute, whether it's a FOIA or whether it's a mandatory, the NDC staff, whether it's the technician that's doing the indexing or the specialist that's working and consulting with the researcher understands that this is somebody who wants access to the records of the American people. So we try to stress that and I certainly know that I do in my division and I know my colleagues do as well. So in addition to processing and working with agencies on access-demand requests, we get to do a bunch of other things in my division. We manage the classified research room. Agency properly clear people, a lot of agency historians in the Defense Department or in the Department of State, they'll come because they have specific historical research projects. We work with those historians, we work with agency environmental cleanup people. Anyone that needs access to their accession records that are still classified, they come to see us and we work with them. We also work with our Federal Records Center program and we manage the Records Center component that handles sensitive compartmented information. The organization is located out at Suitland but we partner with the Federal Records Center program to make sure that agencies can store these specially restricted records and they're protected as part of our Records Center program. Oops, I need to go back. I didn't finish my slide. Our colleagues in research services will have questions. They may identify information that hasn't been through or they're not sure if it's been through the processes of Madeline and Melissa's and they'll come to me and say, this box is supposed to be unclassified but there's documents stamped secret in it. We'll work with our colleagues to make sure that when they're doing that archival processing that we can protect information if it needs to be protected or in most cases we can reassure the processing archivists that no, this really is declassified or is declassifiable and we'll set up a project so that they can continue their archival description so that those records also can go out under the open shelf. Sometimes we have records that are coming out of classified stacks but they've been through the declassification process. There's oftentimes a lag time for us to move those records. We'll do a spot check on records coming out of the classified stacks just to make sure that no classified gets out to the research room but it's also a benefit because the researcher can access those records as soon as they are formally declassified and they don't have to wait for that move to take place. And finally our records management folks that are working with the agencies to schedule records our accessioning folks that are working to bring in the permanent records will have questions about classification and even as early as today I was answering questions from somebody saying what does the agency need to provide us to make sure that the records coming in can be put in the correct queue when Madeleine's folks get those records. So we do that and of course we have goals. Our first one is an open government goal that when former President Obama set up open government working groups was for agencies with a FOIA backlog to reduce that backlog by 10% each year. Now for the last three years the National Declassification Center has reduced its FOIA backlog by over 25%. We've gone from over 1,100 backlog FOIA requests to somewhere in the mid 300s now. I'm committed to making sure that we continue that backlog reduction. Mandatory declassification review requests we want to close those within a year of receipt. Now that can be a challenge because a lot of our requests have to be coordinated with other agencies who have an interest or equity in that record. So this is somewhat of an aspirational goal but we believe in a lot of cases we can close those mandatories within a year. One of the more popular things we've done is had office hours in the main research room at the National Archives in College Park. So a researcher who wants to know well why is this record classified or better yet how can I access how can I ask for this record to be reviewed? I have a senior archive specialist with office hours in the research room. In addition to helping researchers she coordinates and works with the reference archivists in research services to help them understand that no this body of records even though it's still listed as classified finished the process and we got the seal of release of goodness from Melissa's staff a week ago. And here let us show you how we can get you access to these records. We're going to continue our outreach to agency records managers and agency declassification people. Good records management is the backbone of good declassification. And we want to make sure that our partners in the agencies are working together so that the product we get with newly accession records can be processed efficiently and made available to the extent possible. And then everything that we do almost in the FOIA and in a mandatory involves consulting with agencies. We want to get out of the business of copying paper and sending it in envelopes around the Beltway to other agencies. We'd like to explore ways to deliver electronically these consultations and invite collaboration in an online environment with the agencies so that we're not holding up for months a question that in the proper class with the proper classified communications systems can be answered in a matter of minutes. So we're looking at ways to use technology to leverage and improve our program. Before I close, one of the things Carrie mentioned was special media. And special media is a particular challenge for classified FOIAs and mandatory declassification review requests, particularly when you're having to redact out just a little bit of information. And Carrie's folks have years and years of experience doing that with the Nixon tapes. She mentioned also the Dayton Accords. We had a number of FOIA requests for the audio tapes, the audio transcripts in oral history interviews from Dayton, which extend from the 1996 timeframe. We were able to develop processes to allow us to redact the audio where necessary, digitize the audio, and prepare it so that it can be captured, the released versions can be captured in our National Archives catalog. So it's helpful that the researcher can now, as we're releasing these, as we're closing out these FOIA requests, we'll be able to access it digitally, online in their time. One more area is electronic records. The Department of State-classified central foreign policy file is a born digital series of telegrams. Well, we get many requests to under FOIA to process these. Working with our colleagues in research services, we're now able to post the declassified audio and redacted versions of these born digital cables as PDF items in the National Archives catalog. So baby steps, but I really am excited as we become more of a digital organization on how we can make declassification in the 21st century work and how we can share that better with the entire American people. So that's all I have. I'm going to turn it back over to Bill to see if he can moderate questions and answers, and hopefully some of you all out there have some questions for us. Before we take questions, let me just point out we have a resources slide here that provides valuable information that will help or assist researchers and the public understand how to request records to get information, updates about what the NDC may be up to. And I think this would be a great opportunity. I'll do a lead in sort of question here because I think this resources page points to a few things that would be very helpful to requesters. And I'm wondering if Melissa could address indexing on demand from her standpoint and then Dawn could pick up on it from his standpoint and how the two work together and then perhaps we could have Dawn also talk about our blog. So indexing on demand. We had a lot of records that come in through the year. Do we just work on them from the beginning to the end? The first one in is the first one out. We could, but what we want to do is we want to work on the records that you need from us. So we have a program called indexing on demand. You will see a website on there. It's the IOD. It's the indexing on demand URL right there. So click on that. And that'll give you a little information about the program. You will see a list of bodies of records that we can start working on. So you tell us what do you want us to work on? Fill out the request and the first thing that we'll do is it'll flag my team. We'll pull the records. We'll index them right away and then we'll get them to the IRC so the agency partners can take a look. And then what's left in that we'll send over to Dawn's team. That helps prioritize because otherwise it would be a first in, first out system and that may not be the first things that you want to see. Dawn, from your perspective? From my perspective, indexing on demand is a huge success because it allows the public to know one what we're doing and it allows them to play a part in helping us for those records that need that final indexing step, that final segregation of the still classified with the, you know, declassified and declassifiable. It allows them to say, yes, we really think that the U.S. Embassy of London records from 1976 to 1980 will be of great interest and if they're on the list they can contact the indexing on demand coordinator. She will make sure that she'll do a verification say, yep, we're going to put you in the queue. Here's about how long we think it might take and they're going to get the records or at least that 70, 80 or 90% of the records within a matter of weeks or months as opposed to sometimes sadly much longer than that if they were going to go straight to an access demand request. So my archive specialists will sit down with a researcher and say, let's come up with a strategy whether it's indexing on demand whether it's a FOIA whether it's a mandatory review request let's come up with a strategy given what we know and what we see about a body of records to get you what you want in the most expeditious manner and it may be taking multiple steps it may be, well first let's get indexing on demand and then if there's one particular FOIA or one particular folder that's going to need a FOIA we can work on that and you're having to only file a FOIA for one particular folder not for that entire 10 box series of records and I think it's more rewarding for the staff as well I've talked to several of the technicians that work with Melysa and again it goes back to they're not just processing the next series in the queue they're processing and indexing a series of records that somebody out in the public actually wants so I find it successful I know we're almost 17 million pages have gone through this process as we started it a couple of years ago and I find it as a success within the NDC and as I was talking about the NDC as a system I think across the NDC it's something that really works out well and Cadan, you mentioned our blog because I understand that also plays a key role in helping to inform potential researchers about what may be available for indexing on demand actually it's more like five years ago now the NDC took the plunge into the world of social media and we created the NDC blog it's one of many blogs that the National Archives sponsors and I would recommend to anybody out there go to archives.gov there's a thing you can click on that will list all the blogs and they range everything from the archivist of the United States has his own blog various presidential libraries have blogs our office of research services has a blog called the text message but blogs are a great way to get information out now specifically Bill to your question our blog does really kind of two things it informs and I would say it inspires the blog on the information side we post our newly released records quarterly we will do a listing of records that have gone through the process and are now open and available we'll highlight a couple of series in that new release list because usually it's hundreds of series that have been released but we'll highlight a couple that you know we think might be interesting we also post usually it's semi-annually those series that are eligible for indexing on demand so if you're out there and you're going I'm really interested in army intelligence records and so you can go browse the records ready for indexing on demand and then we'll tell you who to contact to get your series into our queue and I also said that the blog inspires one of the things that we're fortunate enough to do is we get to look at some really cool records and staff members will come across something that's you know hey this might make up for a little one page article and maybe there's some cool photographs so we encourage staff to you know spend a little bit of time when they find something really neat that's got a hook or a human interest story and we're able to declassify it and put a blog post out so you can find information about technical details there are even blog posts about how the NDC process works if you want a deeper dive into those flow charts that Bill showed at the beginning we've got those on our blogs or I would encourage you to subscribe just to browse the neat things that we're able to you know work on and declassification so it serves two purposes that's great thank you very much Don and Melissa I have another question that I think may be of interest to the broader audience but I also want to make a point here and that is I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention to our audience the firm, strong commitment and backing of the NDC by the archivist of the United States who happens to be a special guest of ours here today which I think is a concrete it's concrete evidence of the commitment he has made to making access happen and supporting organizations like the NDC in order to be able to serve this broader mission of making the historically valuable records of the United States publicly available now as a follow on question I would also like to give Carrie an opportunity to let the audience know about our commitment and responsibility to continue working on something that she mentioned in her slides and those are the nicks and tapes so yes we are committed to completing the tapes under the presidential recordings oh my goodness sorry recordings presidential recordings and materials preservation act sorry about that which is the special act that governs the nicks and records we will continue with our full complete digital processing of the tapes the unit was moved as one unit under the same supervisor the workers who have been working on the tapes remain working on the tapes thank you Carrie now if there are any questions from the public we'd be happy to try to answer those so this is Andrea I'm back on the microphone so I'm reading questions from our online audience so let's start with a technical question for Carrie someone asks about the editing process and is there a contextual process involved and how is that determined for editing I'm not quite sure you know exactly what they're referring to but that would give it a try perhaps a process of review maybe they're thinking the White House tapes have quite possibly one of the most remarkable archival histories of any collection in the history of record keeping they have underwent a process called chronological review in which every second of tape was reviewed and the regulations developed under PRMPA were applied so the chronological processing and that was processing the tapes in chronological order from the first tape that was put on a recording device to the final tape that process is complete and now we're engaged the process of review was very arduous and difficult and now I view a lot of our time about enhancing the access and completing the review and so with our complete digital review we're going to go back through and I think the contextual question is we're going to review the content that was closed and it needs to be re-reviewed technically that experience is done with an audio software the tape is brought up in what it can it's all fundamentally the same thing but it might be called a project the software we use it's called a montage we load the tape create a montage we mark it up with all the conversations all the withdrawals and we go back to each withdrawal and review it and then the presentation process is getting the agency to review the national security withdrawal and provide us a decision on it and then we go back and output a new file to release to the public I hope that answers the question I think I think yeah considering we're quite sure my contact information I believe isn't the thing I'm happy to answer further questions yeah and I would like to point out we haven't gotten to this slide yet at the end of the presentation if you do have additional questions we've provided you with contact information so you'll be able to find that so I have a question I thought this one was intriguing someone asked how does the national declassification center deal with each agency's different agendas so you've got national declassification I don't know what they mean exactly by agenda but let me back up and say that I'm getting some interesting comments here that lean towards folks who might have conspiracy theories so let me change my question how do you deal with people who have conspiracy questions for you and do you have a general template answer for someone who asks you things that are not your normal agency review question I'm not quite sure how to phrase that I can take a stab at that as archivists and all of us up here are archivists our job is to review and to as much as possible make available the historical record of the United States so we're not in a position to interpret one way or another that's why we invite historians, genealogists lawyers, journalists in our job is to make the information the record available where we can and where we can't to have a defensible reason why we cannot in the world of declassification for example our colleagues in the information security oversight office provide government wide oversight on classification, protection and declassification so if an agency is telling us you've got to hold this information from my agency because it's still classified they have to cite a reason they can't just make up they want to keep this secret well no tell me why tell me why this needs to be secret and oh by the way if it's a FOIA request we're going to tell that researcher he or she may appeal that decision and there are ultimate appellate authorities that will determine that so we we don't something may be or may not be a conspiracy we're just here to make the information available thank you I appreciate the candidate answer and it looks like I'd like to answer that through the eyes of the interagency referral center because that is it's basically a room where all of the agency partners are represented and there isn't an agenda in the IRC for each of the agencies have a declassification guide and that guide tells them what they can and cannot hold and how long they can hold it for it is incredibly specific it is it is not down to a general program it is down to specific words that they can or cannot hold and those guides are reviewed often they're approved by ISOO the information security oversight office there really is a lot of of specifics that govern this it is not haphazard it is not cavalier and it is very tightly controlled we don't allow them to just say I felt like holding this that's just not going to work we just that's just not allowed and they don't do it thank you for the additional explanation looks like we have a audience member question please now thank you I'm Maria I'm a former National Archives archivist and a retired federal historian and my question goes to the special challenges of handling special media which in some instances does not consist of ideal sound quality particularly with the Nixon tapes there's a very good example on the public website elsewhere in the NARA family for the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library where an initial transcriber of one of the Johnson tapes referred to what she thought was being said on the tape as the president calling a foreign national a bastard and it turns out that later review by other archivists and specialists indicated that what the president might have been saying instead was something about a foreign national who was coming in to see him was an ambassador so not a bastard but an ambassador with the Nixon tapes there are particular issues sometimes with the automatic gain control sometimes with the placement of the microphones so what Don was speaking about interpretation of the content of records is further complicated by those sound issues on some of the tapes especially with those recorded in the first building and again some of the White House telephone tapes where they had the automatic gain control issues can you speak to how you're going to be handling that because familiarity with the tapes enables a listener to become familiar with the cadence and the speaking patterns of the people when you layer onto that the issues with poor sound quality that becomes even more complicated when you're doing this type of review is there anything that you can tell us about that so we do the digital era does offer us sort of all the technical aspects of what audio software can do to the signal so for review we do work with the signal see if we can make something more intelligible we have opted we do not release a treated file to the public we feel that it's more important for us to provide a faithful record at this point so but we do try to use audio software to help us with more challenging audio segments for sure but we don't feel that it's in the archive's interest to be sort of mastering the way someone would remaster the Beatles catalog or something like that but the digital era does allow users their own chance to then download the file and work with the audio but our goal as archivists is to work with the signal to make the best review decisions does that answer your question I'm sorry could you go to the microphone please I know that since this work is on the staff thank you for taking a moment to step to the microphone actually my question is to the review process if a portion of a conversation is unintelligible or nearly unintelligible this presents special challenges when you're dealing with national security classification review although it would apply throughout the review process so the Johnson example suggests that two people may hear the same information differently so an ambassador being mentioned or someone being called a bastard or somewhat different takes on the situation when you're working with poor sound quality on these tapes or other special media do you have a process for reconciling how within the review process the internal stakeholders are hearing things when they might be hearing them differently to be honest with the agencies that we have had we haven't had a lot of disagreement amongst their reviewers or them coming to us and struggling with the signal tremendously but in the event that happens we would certainly be willing to work with them listen together to work with the signal to change it just to make sure that we're getting good quality review and decisions but currently we haven't experientially we haven't had reviewers coming to us significantly troubled by the signal but we still have hours left to do okay so this is Andrea are there any final parting words I don't see any more questions coming from our online audience otherwise we will end our conversation so I would like to say personally I really appreciate the work that you do and I can see the passion that you have for getting open government and that very seriously so I want to personally thank you for that so thank you panelists today's video recording will remain available on YouTube as part of our growing know your records list I'd also like to say thank you to our captioner Christine Heim and our audio visual staff thank you and one last thing we do value your opinion very much so please take a few minutes to complete the short evaluation on behalf of the National Archives and our panelists thank you for joining us this concludes today's program