Archives/Research

Here is my entry for Archives/Research:

One can imagine that the Federal Bureau of Investigation groaned with displeasure when Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Not only because the Act opened a floodgate of previously classified documents, but also because it obligated them to provide these documents to most anyone who requests them. There is no doubt that processing declassified documents is a costly undertaking, it involves going over each page with a fine toothed comb and redacting sensitive information. To mitigate this cost, the FBI has developed a FOIA Electronic Reading Room, a website where the public may see popularly requested declassified documents.

The website is relatively clean and straightforward. First there is some explanatory text describing the electronic reading room. The archive itself is a list of declassified case files of famous (and notorious) personalities. Each personality has a short biography, a description of associated documents, and hyperlinks to those documents. Unfortunately some links are broken; and some personalities do not have associated documents . Other than these oversights, the website's interface is adequately designed and functional.

Presentation of archival sources online is an important consideration for any archivist. How many and what kind of records should be available online? The Electronic Reading Room uses Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as its vehicle for presentation, which is an optimal format for the moment. It is unfortunate that the there are no marked-up versions for long-term preservation, but the costs of migrating the documents to XML would be tremendous, so this may be infeasible.

The FBI readily admits that the quality of the digitized copies is often poor, citing the fragility of the original documents. However, as an experienced digitizer I am confident that only a few more seconds per page could have greatly increased the reproduction quality . (Again, processing cost may be a factor here.) Portions of the documents have been redacted, that is, censored necessarily due to privacy and national security concerns. It is selfishly frustrating, nevertheless, to peruse through a previously top-secret document that has been blacked out profusely . Alas.

If there is one weakness that stands above the rest in the Electronic Reading Room, it is the conspicuous absence of search functionality. One can assume that for the same reasons the FBI decided not to scan documents at a reasonable resolution, they decided not to provide one of the most basic tools used by online researchers: the search button. Once more, a few seconds more to scan the text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) would have greatly increased the utility of the website. But now, the online archive is nothing more than an alphabetical list. Other than the obvious advantages of web accessibility, there is no qualitative difference between the website and the physical reading room in Washington, D.C.

For this reason it is difficult to imagine a circumstance where using the Electronic Reading Room would be particularly beneficial to a researcher. Clearly the online archive allows researchers to peruse declassified documents a distance away from the physical archive, but this presents only one advantage of the many that electronic archives present. For example, a centralized search option would allow users to quickly sift through the multitude of text and compare query results. A researcher could, for example, determine interrelationships between two or more case files by looking for commonalities in terminology. Though a good resource for those interested in declassified FBI files, the FOIA Electronic Reading Room goes no further than a repository of poorly digitized documents.