 Good afternoon. I'm Deborah Stidell-Wall, Acting Archivist of the United States. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's program, Making Access Happen, FOIA at the National Archives, which kicks off Sunshine Week for us. Happy Sunshine Week, everybody. Sunshine Week is an annual nationwide celebration of access to public information observed by news organizations, civic groups, private citizens, and local, state, and federal government agencies. Here at the National Archives, access to public information is our very reason for being. We're the nation's record keeper, and we take that responsibility very seriously. One of our four strategic goals is to make access happen. We do that every day in a variety of ways, including through the Freedom of Information Act, which governs access to a range of records here at the National Archives. FOIA is so important to us here that we've committed in our 2022 to 2026 strategic plan to reducing the time it takes to start complex FOIA requests from classified records by fiscal year 2026. Like many agencies across the government, NARA faces the question of what combination of technology and attainable efficiencies can improve the relationship between input, staff hours, and outputs, pages reviewed. While the challenges remain, I'm proud to report that NARA has overcome big obstacles to make access happen, particularly at the National Personnel Records Center, also referred to as the NPRC in St. Louis, where each workday more than 4,000 requests for military service records are made by veterans and their families. The majority of those records are available only in paper form and can be accessed only in person by NARA staff. So not surprisingly, the pandemic caused an unprecedented backlog. Improvements to technology and business processes were crucial to chipping away at the backlog and to maintain making critical operations at the NPRC with a remote workforce. We're back now and working almost around the clock, and we are chipping away at the backlog. Unanswered requests peaked at 604,000 in March 2022, and I'm happy to report that as of a few weeks ago, the backlog was down to 338,000 overdue requests. We have our sites set on December 2023 to eliminate the backlog entirely. Throughout the rest of this week, we'll post short videos on the myriad of ways outside of FOIA that would make access happen here at the National Archives, including at the NPRC. I invite you to check out the Sunshine Week playlist on the National Archives YouTube channel. Before turning the microphone over to our General Counsel and Chief FOIA Officer Gary M. Stern, I want to sincerely thank NARA's Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, for organizing today's program and for the excellent work they do. As the ombudsman for the federal FOIA process, OGIS has a natural home at the National Archives. OGIS's vision to ensure a FOIA process that works for all stakeholders helps ensure access to records held or created by the entire federal government. So, thank you to the OGIS team. I hope you all enjoy today's program, and I'll now turn it over to Gary M. Stern. Thank you, Deb, our great acting archivist, and welcome again to the National Archives and our Sunshine Week panel on Making Access Happen, FOIA at the National Archives. This is the time to celebrate the Freedom of Information Act and openness in government in general, and that's the main reason why I, as NARA's General Counsel, am here with this very distinguished group of archivists as the moderator, because in addition to being General Counsel, as Deb noted, I'm NARA's Chief FOIA Officer, as well as NARA's Senior Agency Official for Privacy. So, I spend a lot of my time working on access issues as General Counsel and helping to guide and oversee and support our archival units and experts who do the heavy lifting in this area. So, at the National Archives, we do FOIA and we love FOIA, but whereas FOIA is often the only way to get government records from just about every other executive branch agency, for us it's just one, and in many ways it's just a footnote to what we do. As we like to say, the National Archives has been doing access since long before there even was a FOIA. We were created in 1934, and the FOIA was not passed until 1966, so essentially access is our middle name, and it's the core purpose of what we do as an archive. It is to make all of our records available to you as soon as we can, whenever we can. And that's why, in our mission statement, our first strategic goal is to make access happen. But given the vastness of our holdings, we have, I think now, over four million cubic feet of paper records, which is well over 12 billion pages of paper, in addition to the petabytes now of electronic records, including hundreds of millions of emails. For example, at the Obama Presidential Library, we have 300 million emails of presidential record emails and an additional 200 million emails from the Obama White House that are subject to the Federal Records Act. If you printed out all those, you'd have another two billion pages of paper. And just in the last two years, we got an additional 100 million emails from the Trump White House. And that's just the tip of the vast holdings that we have in every other type of medium imaginal. We have film, we have videotape, photographs, maps, posters, you name it. And while the vast majority of our records are open to the public, we have a pretty sizable collection of highly sensitive records, classified national security information, nuclear weapons information, law enforcement, personal privacy, tax returns, trade secrets, even rocket science. So our challenge is to figure out how we can provide access to you, the researcher, and the public to these sensitive records, and that's where Foria comes into play. I just want to highlight and note that we also have collections of records that are not subject to the Foria. Most significantly, the records of Congress that we hold on behalf of the Congress, the records of the Supreme Court, those are legislative and judicial branch records, which are not subject to Foria. We provide access to them under the rules that are provided to us from Congress in the court. And then there's another interesting aspect of how we do Foria at the National Archives. I've just described the vast archival holdings. That's our core mission. But we're an agency also, just like any other executive branch agency. So we create our own records as a operating functional administrative agency. And those are also subject to Foria. We call those our operational records. And you'll hear more about that side piece of how we do Foria in just a few minutes. And then as part of the National Archives and the organizer of this very event is the very special office of government information services, OGIS, that is the Foria ombudsman for the entire government. And they help to both mediate Foria disputes between requesters and agencies. And they, in addition, they review agencies, Foria policies, procedures, and compliance. And so they're a very important part of NAR that helps, along with the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, to oversee the entire government-wide Foria program. So I'm now going to turn it over to the rest of the panel so they can kind of give you an overview of the different ways that we do Foria here at the National Archives, starting with my colleague, Becky Calcano. And I'm turning it over to Becky. Take care. As Gary mentioned, I am Becky Calcano, the Manager of the Special Access and Foria Program and Research Services. My team handles Foria requests for accession records in the DC area. I'm also the Foria Public Liaison for Research Services and the National Declassification Center. If you filed a Foria and have had a question or concern, you may have reached out to me. I've been at the National Archives since 2011 and with Special Access and Foria since 2015. As the great Martha Murphy has said, the most important thing that you can take away from today is that the vast majority of NARA's accession records are unrestricted and you do not need to file a Foria to get access to them. If you are searching for records, we have wonderful reference professionals who can help guide you. If the records are restricted, you will find that information in the Access Restrictions Note in descriptions in the National Archives catalog. Access restrictions are indicated by agencies when they transfer records to NARA. Records might be restricted, as Gary mentioned, for a variety of reasons, including classified national security information, personal privacy, information such as social security numbers, birth dates, sensitive medical information, and sensitive law enforcement information such as confidential sources. If an agency has indicated that the records are restricted under the Foria, NARA must do a line-by-line review of the records. My office handles Foria requests for federal executive branch agency records that are unclassified but restricted. As we have expertise with law enforcement sensitivities, we also handle requests for classified Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation records. So what happens after you file Foria? We receive your request, we log it into our case management system, and we search for responsive records. If we locate potentially responsive records, we then go and look at the physical records. We will provide you with a letter that has your Foria tracking number, a statement regarding whether or not NARA has records responsive to your request, and either instructions on how to access the records if the records don't contain any sensitive information or if we already have a public access copy available, or we will let you know which of our processing queues you're in. We have three processing queues. Our first tier is for requests up to 700 pages. Our second tier is for requests between 701 and 3000 pages, and our third tier is for requests over 3000 pages. If you've been placed in one of our processing queues, we will contact you again once your request has reached the front of the queue, and we have completed a line-by-line review. We will provide you with options for how to access the records, as well as information on whether any information has been withheld, and if so, the reason for the withholding. Like other agencies in the federal government, we have seen significant increases in the number of FOIA requests received and in the complexity of those requests. This has led to a growing backlog. FOIA is also not all we do. In my office, we are the custodians of 19 collections of Special Prosecutor and Independent Council records, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and the FBA 9-11 collection. You provide reference and other services on those collections. We also provide guidance to staff across research services on access issues. We are currently in the process of hiring additional staff, and we look forward to continuing to improve our operations in the coming years. We want the request process to be efficient and effective for you and for us from start to finish, and we are constantly trying to improve our ability to make access happen. We have created a team of people dedicated to intake with the aim of improving our front-end processes. As part of this effort, we are working to improve negotiations with requesters to narrow requests. OGIS has provided negotiation training to our staff. At our request, staff from the FBI's negotiation team also met with us and shared resources. We are not only looking to negotiate over new requests, but also existing requests. We audited our backlog and identified requests where we felt there were opportunities to narrow. As a result of these efforts, we were able to reduce our backlog by several hundred thousand pages. The pandemic provided us with the opportunity to develop procedures for processing unclassified records remotely. One of our issues was that the building had limited staff access through much of the pandemic. Since the majority of what our requesters want, our paper records available only on site, this was a challenge. We pivoted. We collaborated with the Electronic Records Division. Some of their holdings include unclassified restricted records which could be accessed and reviewed remotely. They identified series of records and provided copies to us. We then systematically reviewed and redacted the records creating public access copies. The Electronic Records Division described them and worked with the Office of Innovation to upload them to the catalog. As a result of our collaboration, 14 full series and part of a 15 comprising 6,672 files are now available in the National Archives catalog. These records are across four different record groups. The National Mediation Board, RG13, U.S. Attorneys, RG118, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, RG330, and the Federal Judicial Center, RG516. We also took the opportunity provided by the pandemic to establish a process to get records reviewed in response to FOIA requests into the catalog. As a result, 450 file units now have public access copies in the catalog. This effort has already paid off the requesters. When a high school student working on a National History Day project reached out to me to ask for Dorothy Parker's New York FBI file, I was able to email her link to the file in our catalog. Our job is to make access happen. I have a wonderful team of dedicated, smart professionals who believe in our mission and work hard to make it happen every day. I'm proud of them and the work that we do. And I will turn it over to Stephanie Oriaboury, my esteemed colleague. Well, thank you so much, Becky. You are definitely a tough to follow. As Becky said, my name is Stephanie Oriaboury and I am the Director of the Archival Operations Division that is within the Legislative Archives, Presidential Libraries, and Museum Services Office. I've been an archivist at the National Archives for almost 21 years. I began my career at the George H. W. Bush Library in 2002. And in the past two decades, I have reviewed presidential and vice presidential records, process FOIA and mandatory declassification requests, and definitely worked with researchers to provide them access both in the research room and online. I also serve as the FOIA public liaison for all 15 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives. As Gary and Becky have both mentioned, a lot of our records are available outside of FOIA, and I will say that the presidential library system is built on a foundation of public access to historically significant presidential materials and papers. President Franklin Roosevelt donated his personal papers, as well as his presidential papers, as part of the end, part of his Hyde Park estate to the federal government so that his papers could be made available to the public. This established a precedent which resulted in the National Archives providing access to presidential materials before the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966. To understand how we provide access to presidential materials and records, you have to understand that there are three different categories or types of presidential collections in the holdings of the National Archives. There are deeded presidential papers, and those are from President Hoover through President Carter with one exception, and that exception is President Nixon, so that's the second category seized Nixon presidential papers and materials. And the third category are publicly owned presidential records. Within these collections, there are paper documents, photographs, audio and video recordings, as well as in more recent collections, email messages, databases, and social media content. So let's dive into the three types of collections and how we provide access. For the donated papers, as I mentioned, President Hoover through Carter, except for Nixon, their papers were considered their personal property. From George Washington through Carter, presidential papers, those materials created in the White House were considered the personal property of the president for them to do with what they will. Some people donated, some presidents donated them to historical societies, to university archives. Many of the papers of the 18th century presidents are at the Library of Congress. Some of them chose to purposely destroy their records or distribute them to different family members and people who are in their administration. Franklin Roosevelt was the first to really sit down and say, I want my materials at the National Archives and set that precedent. And so for Roosevelt, Ford, and then President Hoover thought it was a great idea, so he did it retroactively. They donated their presidential papers to the National Archives and access to those materials are governed by the deed of gift that they signed in the donation. Therefore, because they are donated materials and not official government records, they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. So how archivists provide access to these materials is that they review them systematically. So an archivist at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas will systematically review the White House telephone conversations that are in that collection. An archivist at the Ford Library will review the National Security Advisors files that contain Memcons, Memorandum Conversations between the different heads of state and the president or the National Security Advisor. So that systematic review is based on input from the public and just knowledge of the collection and what would be of high interest. As I mentioned, they are not subject to FOIA, but there is one way that the public has an opportunity to request these records, and that is through mandatory declassification review. Anyone can request a classified document, photo, video using the mandatory declassification review process, and I know that my colleague Don will dive deeper into that process, so I won't steal his vendor. But moving on, so you have those donated materials and I will say that the vast majority of that, those collections are reviewed and publicly available. Some of the earlier administrations Hoover through Eisenhower, more than 90% of their holdings are publicly available. Even those who don't have that high, it's still 70 to 80% for those donated presidential papers. But we're moving now to C's Nixon presidential materials. Nixon initially had a plan to follow the precedent that President Roosevelt set, and four weeks before resigning, he signed an agreement with the General Services Administration Administrator and the National Archives at that point was under the GSA to donate his presidential papers and materials. However, in his agreement, he made a provision that required the destruction of the White House tapes, which Congress found highly problematic. And so in December of 1974, Congress passed and President Ford signed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, also known as PRMPA. And that PRMPA governs the access to the C's Nixon materials. And so the archivists review those records according to the provisions of the PRMPA and make available what they can. Because these are still considered personal property, they were not government records. They are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act request. But just like with the donated materials, any classified record is subject to a mandatory declassification review request. PRMPA not only governs how we provide access to the C's Nixon papers, it also informed the Presidential Records Act, which established our next and final body of presidential collections in the National Archives. And that are the publicly owned presidential records. Part of the provisions of PRMPA, one of the titles, was to establish a commission to study how presidential congressional and judicial records were handled. And out of that commission, one act dealing with one category of material was passed. And that was the Presidential Records Act of 1978. And the key takeaway from that act and the thing that changed everything is that it stated and codified for now and forever that presidential records are government records. And they're no longer owned by and considered the personal property of the President. And in doing so, because they are now government records from the Executive Branch, they are subject to Freedom of Information Act request. So the Presidential Records Act passed during the Carter administration and was put into place and applied to the administrations after Carter. He was grandfathered. So for the Reagan Presidential Records forward, those are governed by the Presidential Records Act. That means those records are subject to FOIA. And we apply the FOIA exemptions, with the exception of one, as well as six PRA restrictions as we review these materials. But there are some time periods to remember with the Presidential Records Act. Congress, in its conception of the act, wanted to help the National Archives and thought that in five years after the end of the administration, the National Archives would be able to review and make available a large portion of the collection. And then at that five-year mark, there would be FOIA, but there wouldn't be much for the public to file requests for, because most of it would be already reviewed and released. Though wonderful in concept, that did not happen in reality. So the Presidential Libraries in that first five years are focusing on establishing intellectual control. And when they have an opportunity, are doing some systematic review. So at the George H.W. Bush Library, in that five-year period, the archivists were able to review and release the entire Presidential Daily Diary. They were able to review and release all of the speech office files, speech writing files. But, of course, there are other files there that the public is definitely interested in. And so at that five-year mark, there are FOIA requests and FOIA requests to drive review. Instead of that systematic review, we see with the donated presidential papers and the Nixon seized materials. What other thing that is very unique to presidential records, and it's different than what Becky and her team do with a session federal records, is a mandated notification period for presidential records before the National Archives can release them. Whenever we have completed a review and have decided that we are going to release presidential records, we have to notify the relevant former, the representatives of the relevant former president, as well as the representatives of the incumbent president to let them know that we have the intent to release this volume of records. We describe what we're releasing and it gives them a 60 working day period in which they can choose to review those records to determine if they need to assert a constitutionally based claim of privilege. So that is something different, but it's important to note that because of that 60 working day notification, it is impossible for the presidential libraries with presidential records to meet the 20 working day FOIA deadline. So with all of that, Becky has provided an excellent explanation of the processing of FOIA requests. It's very similar for presidential records. One thing to note is that the sensitivity of these papers and records require a line by line review for your paper documents, frame by frame review for your photographs, for your videos, and even with your electronic records, your emails, you're not just reviewing the contents of the emails. You're also reviewing the metadata because that can contain restricted information. So it is very precise, very intensive work that requires a lot of expertise and pulling knowledge just of the collection, the administration and time period, but also extensive knowledge of the application of FOIA exemptions and PRA restrictions. And so we have some of the same restrictions, classified national security, privacy information, but something that is unique that you see more in presidential records than in federal records is information related to the protection of the president and other principles such as the vice president. And I do want to note, and I should have noted this earlier, that the Presidential Records Act applies to vice presidential records as well as presidential records. So with that FOIA process, we receive a request, we do the search. But one thing I want to highlight for everyone is that as lovely as it would be, we do not have an item level log of every record in a collection. So it is very much based on different finding aids that we either, that were either transferred from the White House or that NARA archival teams created once the collections were in our custody. And so with those finding aids and definitely working with requesters, because our goal is to connect you with the records that you need and want us reviewing and looking at records that are completely unrelated does not help you and does not help us. As once we do that process, your records go into a queue based on volume and format and then we process it when it comes up in the queue. One thing to note is that there is not one big presidential library queue. So a request from Reagan is not behind a request from at the Obama Library. There are queues at each of the libraries. So with that, I just want to talk a little bit about some of the challenges and successes we've had. The biggest challenge really is the exponential growth of born digital records. Gary has definitely mentioned that in his intro, but looking at how the volume of records we've taken in and the staff that is able to process that has truly been challenging. With the George W. Bush administration, we brought in 80 terabytes of unclassified electronic records. We brought in 250 with the Obama administration. Those were both two-term presidencies. Looking at the Trump administration, though just one term, we also brought in 250 terabytes. So that is a huge volume. And I know terabytes doesn't mean very much to me, but to break it down for those of us who don't speak tech, looking at number of emails, the Clinton Library had received 20 million unclassified emails at the end of that administration. Versus the Obama Library, which Gary mentioned, received nearly 300 million unclassified emails. And so that is a huge challenge for us in the FOIA request world, partly because it's just the sheer volume of how many potential responsive records there are. But add to that another challenge, which is the increase in the number of FOIA requests that the libraries receive. The Obama presidential records became subject to FOIA in January of last year. In the first month, the Obama Library received more than 1,000 FOIA requests. A year later, the library's FOIA backlog is approximately 21.9 million pages, 247.2 million email messages and other electronic files, 76,000 digital photographs, and 198,000 videos. So just those numbers, that is the challenge we are facing with each presidential collection coming in. But in spite of all those challenges, similar to what Becky said, the expertise, the dedication, the creativity of the archival teams at the presidential libraries continue to make access happen for our researchers and requesters. Even with the obstacles that we have to encounter, we are still providing records of the highest level of the federal government, long before other countries. We have researchers who are coming from other countries to look at our records, because they can't get access to their country's records. I know that we had researchers at the Bush 43 Library trying to understand the UK's role in the war in Iraq, because they couldn't get records from the British National Archives, but they could get them from us. Other quick wins is that the libraries are making more and more records available in the National Archives catalog with supplemental finding aids on their websites. And along those lines, the Obama Library will be the first fully digital library where all released records will be made available online. And so with that, I think I've taken more than my fair share of time. I will pass the mic to my wonderful colleague, Don McElwade, who is with the National Declassification Center. Thank you, Stephanie. As Stephanie noted, I'm Don McElwade. I'm the director of an interesting part of the National Declassification Center in that my team processes FOIA and mandatory declassification review requests for classified federal records and some classified presidential records. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. But you may be asking, well, what is this NDC anyway, or National Declassification Center? It was established in December of 2009 with President Obama's executive order 13526. And in the executive order, it said, NDC, you will do the following. You'll streamline declassification processes across the government. You'll facilitate quality assurance reviews and measures. And you'll provide some standard training so that every agency that has classified information knows what the other agencies that may have their information in their files is doing. So how did we do this? And how did we get to this point? We surveyed our records prior to the establishment of this order and found that we had a backlog of approximately 405 million pages of classified federal records, not even getting to the presidential side yet, in our stacks and our classified stacks here at the National Archives. This backlog clearly was unacceptable. The backlog resulted in what I called the merry-go-round of review and re-review with no records ever leaving that merry-go-round as declassified. There was second guessing. There was no standard training so that if I'm the Department of State and the Army has information in my records that the Army is telling me, hey, look out for this. So there were a lot of issues. The NDC was stood up. We began looking at this. We were challenged by President Obama to eliminate that backlog by the end of 2013. The great news is we were successful in doing that. That doesn't mean that everything was put out onto the open shelf, but it did stop the re-review. It established training, which goes on today. It allowed agencies to recognize other agencies' interest. And the term of art we have for that is called equity in their records. And we established the quality assurance process that involves interagency teams looking at these records systematically to ensure that a good first-cut review, systematic review, which is generally pass or fail at the document level, was conducted. So these records series or collections of records are reviewed as fail. What happens next? The records that fail, the records that cannot be declassified at the document level are indexed into our database and withdrawn. The rest of the collection, assuming there's no other restrictions that Becky's staff would normally handle, like privacy or law enforcement or business confidentiality-type information. Then those records can go out of the open shelf, and anyone can contact Archives 2 Reference and access those records. They may be going through those declassified records and come across what we call a withdrawn items notice. It's a piece of paper that has some basic metadata about that particular document or file that was withdrawn. That researcher can then file either a FOIA request or a mandatory declassification review request if that document is classified. If it's coming through the National Declassification Center, it was withdrawn because it was still classified. So what do we do? We coordinate that review of federal records. We don't have original classification authority ourselves, so we can't just wave a magic wand and declassify these other agencies' information. But what we can do is facilitate their review and send out information. And some agencies have even given us, you know, basically loaned us authority for historically valuable records over, say, 25 years. They've allowed us to act on their behalf. So we may be a victim of our own success because in 2019, NARA decided that, hey, the NDC is doing a pretty decent job with this classification review. They have the subject area expertise. They have developed relationships with the government agencies who own that classified information and federal records. And we began a process of consolidating the classified presidential papers and records at the NDC. As you all know, in 2020, everyone's world got kind of turned upside down on its head. But before COVID hit, we were able to get the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, Carter, George W. Bush records into the NDC. We also brought the Obama records in, and while not yet subject to FOIA, the classified Trump paper records are with us. Stephanie's nodding her head. A lot of the classified electronic records from the presidential libraries are still with her shop down in Washington, D.C. We coordinate with her. And I know her vision, her happy day, is when those electronic files are transferred to us in the NDC so we can review those. So we deal with the classified records. We coordinate very closely with Stephanie with the individual libraries and with Becky in our Office of Research Services. So what would happen? You are a good researcher sitting in the research room, say at Archives 2 or say in Dallas at the George W. Bush Library, and you come across with drawn notices. You say, hey, this looks like it might be really useful to my research. I'm going to file a FOIA request. If it's for classified records, the request is going to come to us. For FOIA requests in presidential libraries, we coordinate with those archivists at the libraries. We also do for mandatory review requests for the pre-presidential records at libraries. So it's not just us doing things on our own. We're coordinating with our library colleagues. And what we will do is prepare a consultation package for those records that have been requested. Consultation package basically means we make copy, we review the records, we identify which agencies have valid equity. And equity is a declassification term of art, which basically just means that agency has a classified interest in that record, whether they created it or whether they contributed to it in some way. And I like to use the example going back to my days. I started out as a technician here at the National Archives back in the early 90s. And so we used to do page by page declassification with you. And so an example I like to use was State Department Embassy reports going back from the embassy back to the Department of State here in Washington. That weekly report may contain information from Department of State officials at that embassy, the political officer, the economics officer. But it may also contain information relating to the military. Perhaps there was a Navy liaison. Perhaps the FBI had a person there. Perhaps commerce or other government agencies that have information contributed to that weekly report. If that information is classified and that agency can still keep it classified, we will send that consultation out. What we do now is we scan the records into the processing system that we have. We share that processing system with Becky. They use it to track the cases. They use it to scan and create redactions. And so we do the same thing. We say we send a document out to the State Department in the Army. They do their reviews. So it gets caught up in their backlog as well. They do their reviews, send the results back to us. We take their decisions and normally will implement their decisions. It's not just blind implementing. We may say, really? I don't see based on reviewing your agency's declassification guide how you can hold that as a still classified information. So we'll push back. The NDC FOIA and mandatory review team is kind of in some ways that fulcrum in the middle of a seesaw. We're trying to get agencies to review their records, release as much as they can while we understand that there are certain things that still need to be protected as national security information. Even certain old things that may still need to be requested, be protected. So we do that balancing act. We negotiate with the agencies where we need to. We also may negotiate with the researchers. One of the things that we do is say you're asking for this information. And one of my specialists who's working with you may know of a finding aid that was either created by the presidential libraries or created by our colleagues in research services or something that came along when we accessioned the records from a particular agency. If we know of a finding aid and we can get that researcher to narrow his or her request by using finding aids already in the archives, it's a win for the researcher. It's a win for us. Because the last thing we want to do is scan in hundreds or thousands of pages when it's really not going to answer that researcher's question. It's really not going to make access happen. So we are constantly trying to do that. So as I mentioned, the presidential libraries, it's a similar situation early on when we knew that the NDC would be getting presidential classified. First thing I did is I said, I need to talk to my colleagues at the presidential libraries. Stephanie and I worked on kind of a schema, a model for how FOIA's and mandatory reviews would work when transferred to presidential library classified was requested. We were fortunate that our first case was the George W. Bush library records. I am thrilled that not just did we develop a good test case, we tweaked it from time to time. But we've developed really, really good working relationships between my staff and the archivists at the libraries. And I'll give a shout out to the folks at Bush 43 because they were the guinea pigs. And we've used that working relationship as a model for how we go forward with process and classified presidential. All that said, everything is not beautiful and rosy. There are challenges that we face. The first one is technology. That really cool processing system that Becky's team and my team use is not a young system. In fact, the system is so old that it could buy a drink at a bar here in Washington, DC. It was developed in 2001, 2000 that era. It's been updated. It's been had its hand held as much as we can. I think we're coming to the point where we need to start getting a newer, more modern system to track our cases and to handle as both Becky and Stephanie have mentioned that growing backlog of foreign electronic records. The system that we have now can handle small amounts. In fact, we process the Department of State classified cables from 1973 through 1979 requests in that system. But we're really going to be facing an avalanche of born digital records and not born digital, just textual type records, but records in all sorts of media. So that's one of the things, one of the challenges that we are working at is how do we modernize our platform for classified records? This is especially true with presidential records. Stephanie mentioned that presidential records become subject to FOIA five years after the incumbent leaves office. Normally classified federal records are accessioned to NARA at 25 years after they've been created. So we're used to dealing with federal records that are 25 years old or older. We're now dealing with presidential records that are only five or six years old. So there's a lot more digital information in that era. Again, we need systems that can store, retrieve, review, redact, and release large volumes of classified electronic records. And that's going to be our future. We already have smart people working on this. And I really look forward to the day that we have that system. And I'm confident we'll get there, but it's going to be a challenge and an opportunity. Another area is in electronic communications. We don't have a robust system for sending out and processing consultations of classified records. And this is a challenge, not just for NARA. It's a challenge throughout the federal government. I participate in a FOIA community forum where some agencies are sending their classified over a secret level network. Other agencies are sending their classified over a top secret and above network. The networks can't necessarily talk to each other. Having that and having possibly even since we're the archives and we get everything, possibly being able to have that communication, have that ability to communicate with our partner agencies in a secure and a safe way that sure beats burning scan documents to a DVD and sending it around the beltway in a courier. So we look forward to continuing to work on that issue. I'll give a shout out to our general counsel, Gary Stern. He has advocated tirelessly for that for a long time. And again, that's something that we look forward to. Finally, backlogs and staffing. As I'm sure Becky, Stephanie, Joe, any one of us can tell you COVID was not our friend. And in particular, in my world, you have to be on site to process classified records. You just can't take them home. So we had people coming in, you know, in a limited way, we were able to at least get our cases logged in. But we were not necessarily fully staffed to do searches and chip away at that backlog during COVID. Since reentry in March of last year, we've been fairly successful in knocking down the federal backlog. And by the end of this month, we hope to get all of the existing presidential that's newly assigned presidential and the backlog of what I call inherited presidential cases into our tracking system. Before I close, I don't want you to think it's all bloom and doom in the classified world. We have some, I think, really great success stories. Our federal FOIA backlog has been on a steady decline since 2015. And I'm confident that decline of federal FOIA backlogs will continue. Since we've had our reentry, we have resumed having national declassification center staff be on call and available in our main research room here at Archives 2 to answer questions from members of the researching public who want to know what's the best way to access or ask for declassification review of classified records. This is kind of blended into what we call our indexing on demand program. We have thousands of feet of records that have gone through the declassification process, but are hitting a backlog on that final indexing where we separate the still classified from the declassified documents so that the declassified series can be made available. We've created lists of records that are subject to this process, this prioritization. This allows members of the public to help us decide what gets processed next. And as I've gotten feedback from our Archives technicians who do the day-to-day segregation and indexing, the fact that indexing on demand projects have a real-life human researcher behind them who wants that access makes those technicians feel that their work is more important. They're not just mindlessly segregating and indexing, they're segregating and indexing for someone who wants access to their government's records. So that has been a huge success. We've done over 16 million pages of records that have been released since this process. And again, one final thing that we're doing is the NDC was hugely successful leading an interagency effort to reduce that 405 million page backlog that was past fail review. We still have dozens of agency reviewers onsite here continuing to help us make sure that that backlog never grows to that level again. What we're asking agencies, our partners to do is help us when we come across classified FOIAs, help us triage those requests, help us do it onsite here, because if we can do it onsite here, then we don't need to send it. And it's a win-win because every agency in the federal government, at least everyone that I know of, has FOIA backlogs. If we can use agency expertise and NDC expertise to resolve issues of agency equity here at this one facility for federal records, and quite frankly for presidential records, especially with some of our older libraries, we can make access happen for more records, and we can do it more quickly. Becky and Stephanie and I have talked about archival records and papers in executive branch agencies and in presidential libraries. I'm going to turn it over now to my good friend, Joe Scanlon, who's going to talk about what about those records that NARA creates. Joe, over to you. Thanks, Don. As Don said, my name is Joe Scanlon. Like Don, I've been with the agency for a smidge over 30 years now, starting off as a technician. But I've been with Office of General Counsel as the FOIA and Privacy Act officer since November 22nd, kind of an infamous date, in 2011. And back in those days, it was just myself and one deputy FOIA officer. Our FOIAs that were coming in at the time were only about 269. It wasn't crazy. And we had 66 appeals a year. As of last year, though, we're at 944. And we're at a steady 90 appeals now every year. So the team is only just myself and one deputy FOIA officer. I have three deputy FOIA officers and a government information specialist, each one who does an outstanding stellar job in processing the operational FOIAs that we receive. And as I kind of mentioned, appeals. The political authority in our agency is the deputy archivist, who currently is the acting archivist. But that authority has been transferred by our acting archivist to the deputy chief operating officer for the period of time while she is still acting archivist. It's very confusing explaining it that way, but it works really easily. So our office also assists the deputy archivist, or in this case, her backup, to process the appeals of both FOIAs and MDRs across the agency. And that includes the appeals of any of the decisions that are that our access team makes here in office of general counsel. My team also supports litigation for FOIAs. And that tends to be the FOIAs for operational records only, but we have some assistance with those FOIAs that go to litigation for residential library records or or anything that's on the federal assertion side. Our team has also pulled into some special projects. The most recent big one would probably be the JFK assassination records collection and the push to get as much of that released as possible. My team is also the ones that if you go to archives.gov forward slash FOIA, that's our FOIA landing page. And if you go there, you'll see off to the right hand side, there's a little button that talks about electronic reading room. That's where we post all of all of the records that are of operational sense that we have been we've released either because of litigation or because of FOIA requests or because we believe that the records we proactively can release the information. It tends to help a little bit. And as I noticed in as I stated in my title, I'm also the Privacy Act Officer. So our office also provides privacy act requests for those records that are in system of records here in the National Archives. So if someone usually a misnomer on that is when people submit a privacy act request because they worked for the FAA, we don't handle your privacy act request. If you worked at the FAA, please go to the agency that you worked for. While we've seen a great increase in all of our FOIA requests regretfully and part of it is due to the pandemic, we have also seen a great increase into our FOIA backlog and our appeal backlog. We are at around 650 backlog FOIAs and we are at around 190 backlogged appeals. A lot of that had to do with the fact that we weren't able to get in this building and touch it to a dog that we weren't able to touch any of our classified FOIAs or any of our classified appeals. And yes, the National Archives does create records that are that are labeled classified only because of the way we communicate with those agencies that are original classification authorities. I think most of you would know those names like CIA, FBI, and then all the DOD components. Because of that increase in backlog of the FOIA backlog and I think our appellate backlog, we have started to see an increase in litigation. And I'm kind of doing a wink when I say that a kind of increase. When I first started this job in 2011, we had one litigation that dealt with FOIA. We're now up to 56 this year. But a lot of that has to do with things that are completely outside of our control. And you'll see them on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times when you hear mention of our agency. Those tend to be those areas that we are now involved in. Something that was kind of unique to our office and only our office and all of the National Archives is that starting in the end of 2013 and really started rolling around 2014 until the end of the last fiscal year, is our office decided to pilot using FOIA online as a tracking and a quasi processing system in order to handle FOIAs, really only FOIAs. So it didn't touch anti-airpeals and it didn't touch a privacy act request, even though I think some of our requesters believed it did. While we were using it, what I noticed is that we were starting to receive an increase in FOIAs, but it wasn't for records at the National Archives. We weren't really sure what happened, but we started to see a huge uptake to the 200 to 300 requests a year of people asking for their immigration records. Now, while NARA does have historic immigration records, you have to come back 100 years to start seeing those records. We don't have current ones. And yet that seemed to be a, I don't know if it had something to do with the ease of access to get the FOIA online or FOIA online's connectivity to the National FOIA portal, which you can find at FOIA.gov. But what I've noticed is when we ended our relationship with FOIA online at the end of last fiscal year, that number has decreased. We still get some, but we don't get the sheer volume that we did before. Ah, the volume that we have now have become significantly more complex. Complex in the sense of sensitivity, whether it's because of estranged presidential records at various private homes, or if it's because of decisions by other agencies to shudder NARA facilities, over and say the West Coast. That level of complexity requires a whole lot of consultation with other agencies, communications, internal, and just to share volume of records that can be located under a search. So in that sense, the pandemic was, all of these things seem to happen during the pandemic, and none of that is what I would call beneficial. But one thing that is beneficial during the pandemic is it forced our office to go to a completely paperless FOIA case file system so that we could access provided it wasn't classified, because it allowed us to still do the majority of our work from as we were teleworking because our building was closed to us. Um, so there's there is that I see that as a nice step for our for our office. I think also with us piloting FOIA online, it gave us a bit of a test or a taste of of what it would be like to have a future, some new technology, new technology that is that would allow us to be able to track and process all of our requests, not just FOIAs or appeals or anything, just some of the others that would also contain robust search characteristics. And it would release my team from having to do redundant redactions. And I know that's the same across the entire agency when it comes to how many times do you want to do you want to use an electronic software in order to box out someone's social security number or their, in our case, your your private phone number, your email account. And whatever that software is, it needs to be scalable, as has been mentioned by my three previous colleagues. We are the one agency that doesn't get to get rid of the records that come in for holdings. They're here. They're here forever. Hopefully they're not always going to be sensitive, but they'll be sensitive longer than I'm alive. So it's, it's, it's, it seems to be one of those unique things that we as an agency need to tackle. And as I said, FOIA online gave us a taste of what that could look like, that kind of interoperability. I actually am going to hand it now back to my boss, Gary Stern. I helped condense for everyone else who, who spoke longer than me. Look, operational files and files just aren't as sexy as, as what's in the holdings of this agency. I'm just going to tell you people that now. Thank you, Joe. And on and Stephanie and Becky, all of you really appreciate your presentations. And what you've shown to our audience is one, another kind of unique aspect of how we do FOIA at NARA. We have what's called a decentralized FOIA program. Most agencies across the government have sort of a centralized single place where you go and make a four year request, and they, they handle and respond to them, even if they have to sort of farm it out to different components to conduct their search initial searches. Here at the archives, we've put the full responsibility on these different FOIA program offices. Becky for essentially federal records of executive branch agencies, Stephanie who oversees the FOIAs for presidential records that are subject to the FOIA, starting with the Reagan Library forward, Don who oversees and manages FOIAs for classified records in our holdings. And so if a FOIA comes in where to whomever it comes into, then we will refer it out to the appropriate FOIA office. And as Joe said, FOIA online was a system that is actually developed by another agency, the EPA, and then a lot of many agencies to use its technology just as essentially a place to receive a more centralized way of receiving requests and then also responding to the requester. And it was very effective, very useful tool. But they stopped essentially, well, they are shutting it down at EPA at the end of this fiscal year. So we had to phase out of that. And one of the things you've heard a little bit about, and I'm going to sort of ask my colleagues to give maybe a little more detail, is the challenge and the need for, but the limitations we have with sort of the latest modern technology in dealing with FOIA. I did want to note, and I've in a few at a few times, I hope you've been able to see our audience on YouTube, some of the links that I put up started with a link to our FOIA page, the basic FOIA page at archives.gov, which has kind of then has access to all of our resources, including our annual reports. We just posted just in the last week, the finalized reports for documenting what we did in 2022. And then I did put up a link to the PRA, the Presidential Records Act notifications that Stephanie mentioned that we have to do before we can release Presidential Records under the FOIA. And then a link to the NDC, the National Declassification Center's webpage. So those are just some of the resources you can get to online that I want to share. So with the time we have remaining, I really would like to get sort of further insights from the panel on, in the first instance, what could we do if you had a magic wand to improve FOIA at NARA? And I know Don talked a little bit about it, so I'm going to start with Becky. Sure. So if I had a magic wand, and I could magic us all to have hundreds of staff, I would definitely, definitely do that and set up processes by which we could do systematic proactive review of unclassified, restricted records, for example, that would be a dream. But I'll also note that one of the biggest issues impacting the entire national security community today is making the workforce look more like the American people by increasing diversity. Policies that increase inclusivity not only create a more diverse workforce that represents the whole spectrum of the American people and values, but they also improve national security in the long run. Groups with high levels of diversity make better decisions and operate more innovatively than those with homogenous membership. NARA is strongly committed to the principles of diversity and inclusion and embraces diversity that our employees bring. We believe that this diversity inspires innovation, encourages respect, and promotes unlimited success. And we're committed as an agency to creating a workplace where we welcome the views and perspectives of all employees and recognize and appreciate their talent skills and abilities. Thank you, Becky. Stephanie, how about you? I love when I get a magic wand to just do whatever I want. I think I would focus, it would be an internal set of changes as well as external, internally embracing technology, and I shouldn't say embracing because we do embrace technology, but actually having the funds and the wherewithal to be able to actually take that technology is great and actually implement it to really have it benefit our work processes and ultimately the researchers. So that is incorporating machine learning and advanced analytics to specifically our electronic records, our born digital records, but also the paper records that we've digitized so that instead of looking at 300 million emails and running a keyword search to try to get at what a requester in the public wants, we can negotiate with that requester, search on concepts and really be able to isolate and review and release what is requested. And so definitely being able to implement that kind of technology from the basics of de-duping emails to that advanced analytics so that we can characterize the records and be able to speak with greater knowledge to requesters. Second internal thing is just like Becky said is more staff, as we all described it's a very precise intense review and so if you're having to put eyes on every page, every photograph, every bit of embedded metadata, more eyes means more records reviewed and released and so definitely having increase in staff and great point, Becky, is an increase in staff that has different perspectives so that we can leverage the strengths of all of that team to be a better overall archival team and really approach the records in a helpful collaborative way. So yes, I completely second that and the external piece and this is the one that really in some ways is the most difficult is building up an understanding of the expertise of our staff because we have lots of requesters who this is their first time filing a FOIA request, I'm not sure how the process works, they don't know our collections and they're open to hearing and getting guidance and advice but there are some requesters who are a little bit less, they trust the government a little less and they don't fully appreciate that we are truly public servants and that we have a lot of expertise about our collections and that we all have access as our priority objective and our reason for being basically and so that when we're trying to negotiate with them and to partner with them it is not out of a spirit of trying to withhold but really more clearly identify their information need and connect them with the exact records that they need to meet those. So that would be my magic wand. Don, you already touched on some of this stuff, is there any else you wanted to add on what would be the most important and effective way to really improve and reduce the backlog in the NDC? I'm going to build a little bit on what I've touched on and then what Becky and Stephanie touched on and in my perfect world and I don't think I touched on this too much, I would have a lot more staff, I would have a staff that looks like the community in which we serve and I would have a staff that again we're talking magic wand, I would have a staff that on day one they were dropped in with all the knowledge of agencies, sensitivities and the experience that all of us here on this panel have had and the diversity of experience that all of us on this panel have had in reviewing records not just for national security information but for law enforcement and other sensitivities for privacy that would be my magic wand is to be able to get a whole other room of bright, eager, knowledgeable staff people that we could have to do this work. Now the other piece that I already touched on was the technology bit in Don's perfect, again we're waving magic wands, in Don's perfect world I have a consultation of the archival or federal or presidential record, it needs to go out to three agencies, there is a seamless portal where that classified information can be accessed and a decision can be made and you know Becky and Stephanie this could work with unclassified but highly sensitive information too, this magic portal and I know that the technology is probably either out there or close to being out there where we could do this. A few years ago I was the NARA person for what was called the Argentina declassification project and I was jealous, I'll admit it, I was jealous about our friends in the intelligence community who had highly classified drop boxes that they could share information and do declassification in real time, gosh I would really love to be able to do that with classified archival records so those are the two big things if I had a magic wand that I would want to do, thanks Gary. Thank you guys so you know what what you're hearing from these folks of course is the wish list of everything we want and need to not only improve how we do for you just to keep up with the vast demands that we get under FOIA in addition to you know everyone wanting access to our records and the statistic I often think about is if you sort of were to track over the last 30 years the increase in the volume of our holdings just the paper since the mid 80s to the present it's virtually quadrupled back in the mid 80s we had about three billion pieces of paper now we have you know roughly 12 billion it's quadrupled and that doesn't include this huge additional accessioning of electronic records and yet if you tracked our budget the overall budget and staffing in the national archives it's been pretty much flat for the last 30 years so we're in this just really difficult position of you know having so many more records having more requests and more complicated requests with the same number of people and essentially the same amount of resources to do the work and and unfortunately we're having to do so much of that work the way we've done over the last 30 years and haven't been able to take advantage of the technology but you know a question that we often get and I think people just wonder about is you know everything is moving electronic to you know is becoming electronic and moving towards electronic so how come uh nara uh when when will nara digitize all its records and make everything available online what's what's the hold up there who wants to take on that question I I will take part of that question I don't have the expertise in the full answer to that but I think something that we all have to consider is digitizing everything doesn't necessarily mean meaningful access and so along with that digitization we have to have finding aids and we still have to do and capture metadata that allows the public to search so that they can find out out of the billions of digitized records if we do digitize everything the 20 pages that they're looking for and so I think the goal of digitize everything is not the in place the in place is providing meaningful access to our holdings and digitization is a path towards that but to achieve that ultimate goal there's a lot more than just scanning paper and I think that is part of the delay in our digitization efforts is making sure that we have all of the other pieces necessary before we say we're done everything's digitized and you have access but that's just my take yes I think that hits it pretty well anybody else have any thoughts on on that challenge that issue and if not I just wanted to note as as the acting archivist said in in the introduction in her introduction you know we have made improving our our responsiveness to four-year requests one of the main goals in our strategic plan I just put up the link to the strategic plan on the website and what what it says objective 3.2 now reduce the time it takes to start complex four-year requests for unclassified records and and and some of the places where that that is most challenging are at the recent presidential libraries that are subject to FOIA. Stephanie mentioned president's records aren't subject to FOIA until five years after the president leaves office so trump records for example are not subject to FOIA the Obama records however are they just became subject to FOIA last year and then we have George W. Bush and Clinton records as well so in the strategic in our plan we have several goals and they and they relate to everything you've just been hearing about our goals are in the next four years to digitize all the paper records at the Clinton and the George W. Bush presidential library and frankly also even though it's not in our plan we're planning to do the same for the Obama records all of the unclassified records we want to digitize but coupled with that we have to have improved technology to be able to search review redact and provide access to that so we have the intent to incorporate a much better and more advanced FOIA processing tools in our electronic records archives the system that's partly in place and that we continue to develop and improve upon for managing and processing all of our records electronic records online if we can digitize the records we can put them into ERA and then process them that way so that's that's a key goal that we're essentially in the middle of working on and will continue to work on for the next three years and so that is you know what we're trying to accomplish and I guess you know as we're winding down in this this forum I appreciate if each of you could sort of tell us a story of your favorite record or your favorite FOIA experience you've had recently just to share even as you and we all try to struggle with keeping up with with the caseload and the burden it still ultimately is a joy that we have to be able to provide access to our records so I'm going to start with Joe and then each of you if you want to just share an experience a FOIA experience would really appreciate it oh wow so um I would say probably one of my I mean I've had multiple ones just because of how long I've been doing access here at our agency but a unique one and it tends to circle around a session records and this one has to do with the release of information dealing with the Vietnam era tomb of the unknown soldier the the flyer who's who we had his records in our holders it was it was amazing and according to various different requests to have access to these files which not exactly sure who located them but someone asked for them I had to do the review but I think what was interesting about it is that it it basically showed that this gentleman that this pilot was killed in Vietnam and then his his personal identification information his his dog tags his wallet things of that nature disappeared when he was his his remains were made of that out of out of Vietnam and so that's what these records showed and I was like based on that and based on on one of the things that we all do um in our agency when it comes to FOIA requests is we do this it's it's like can it be released is there harm is it it's kind of like department of justice came out with a new foreseeable harm uh training kind of little little uh information packet for us all and applying foreseeable harm and gnar has been doing that since so as gary said since we were we stood up as an agency um back in the 30s and this was another other opportunity where yes according to the to the statute of the what's called the McCain bill I could have held the material but based on the foreseeable harm I was like no I believe that this this is who this gentleman is and we should be able to release these records and because of that his um his remains were disinterred from from Arlington and his remains were sent back to his family um I just I don't know that it just felt good so that's that's my poignant story gary don we only have a few minutes left so real quick one uh quick one I'm gonna actually go with process and as we began working with the presidential libraries we realized that we had to be partners we had to work together and there was a request it was actually an appeal with the George W. Bush library where we were able to search the classified files identify the unclassified or declassifiable records within that file scan and redact them and return them to the George W. Bush library and then work with the bush library to get the ones that were still classified coordinated and consulted with the agencies it was kind of an early success um again with really good archives people on both sides of the NDC and the bush 43 library to prove a concept that Stephanie and I had come up with to see that it really does work and it leveraged the process knowledge of how to do declassification and the subject matter expertise of our library colleagues to make access happen in a way that if you had asked me in 2017 or 2018 would this work I would have said nah but it did and that's because of amazing cooperation across NARA units breaking down barriers and the result is access happened so that that'd be my kind of a process example that's awesome thank you Stephanie um I would just say Foya in and of itself when I first got this job and was explaining to my father who is not from the United States that my whole purpose in the job is to take government records and make them available to the public for accountability and it just floored him he's like wait a minute the government is proactively putting out there the work that it does behind the scenes and so just working through that process of explaining to my father what my job was it helps me it reminded me of truly what a public service it is and I think through any story any record it's about the public service thank you frozen I'm not I just didn't hear you I didn't know if you would wrap up or if you wanted me to give a quick story I would like you to if you could thanks so in 2016 a requester placed Foya requests for Department of Justice case files on the 1972 shooting of two students at Southern University we processed them in 2018 and then we found out later that that requester shared the files with the LSU cold case project who used the records in a four-part series and then based on their work Louisiana Governor John Bell Edwards in November this past November apologized on behalf of the state to the victims of the families the families the victims and to the protest leaders and it was just such an amazing story about how we can help advance the understanding of history how important and impactful our records are and showcases not only that but also that collaboration really makes a difference not only our collaboration with requesters but collaboration between requesters out in the world and their research community so I that's my my best story hey that's really cool and and uh as as many folks know the civil rights cold case collection act that was passed about four or five years ago modeled on the JFK to John F. Kennedy assassination records collection act of 1992 uh is uh Nara's Nara plays a central role in establishing and maintaining the collection of civil rights cold case records and then helping to make them available uh so that's an important um function that we do but of course it's the same people working on that project that are also trying to work on responding to four-year requests which is yet another reason why uh we still have the challenge of very large and significant backlogs but anyways I hope uh everyone who's been watching and listening uh got at least a somewhat better sense of how how the FOIA works at the National Archives and our commitment to access and openness uh even as we you know are challenged by trying to keep up with the ever increasing demand of our researchers but that's what we're here to do and they're doing our best so I want to thank everyone thank my my panelists and uh for the folks on YouTube this is being recorded and you can share it and and let others know what we're up to and what we're doing and uh and we appreciate everyone's interest in the National Archives and I want to wish everyone and once again a happy sunshine week and I'm gonna uh as as we sign out uh there's gonna be a little follow-up uh uh uh I think a preview video of some of the other activities that will be happening at the National Archives uh for the rest of Sunshine Week so thanks everyone we appreciate your tuning in take care bye bye hi everyone my name is Pamela Wright and I'm the Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration also known as NARA today's topic is open government at NARA a topic that we are passionate about the administration's 2009 open government directive designed agency open government plans to be a public roadmap for incorporating the principles of transparency participation and collaboration into the mission of agencies at the National Archives open government has always been part of our mission after all we've been providing access to the records of the government in our research rooms since the 1930s open government initiatives further the effort to strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government the open government initiative is also an international one the united states is one of the eight founding members of the open government partnership launched in 2011 it serves as an international platform for countries committed to making their governments more open accountable and responsive to citizens today the partnership has grown to 76 countries around the world as part of the requirements of the open government partnership the united states has developed an open government national action plan the most recent version was launched in December 2022 within the U.S. National Action Plan the National Archives plays an important role by leading on commitments for freedom of information and in open innovation activities our current emphasis on open government guided us when we refined our agency's mission statement which is we drive openness cultivate public participation and strengthen our nation's democracy through public access to high value records you can take a look at in our own open government plan which we published on archives dot gov last december just go to archives dot gov forward slash open in the last decade we've completed more than 120 open government commitments we've accomplished a great deal in strengthening open government but we have more to do staff from around the agency will be sharing updates on their open government efforts and i hope you get to take a moment to view some of their videos the staff is passionate about open government as well as the mission of our agency to preserve and provide access to the permanent records of the federal government that's what open government and sunshine week is all about