Opening the Archives

The Opening the Archives Project is an ambitious undertaking organized by Brown University and the Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Paraná, Brazil with the support of the U.S. National Archive and Record Administration and the Brazilian National Archive to systematically digitize and index tens of thousands of declassified documents in the U.S. government archives related to Brazil from 1960 to 1980, and to make them available on mirror websites at both universities. These websites will also feature several thousand pages of CIA intelligence reports previously available exclusively at the National Archives II facility in College Park, MD.

To accomplish this task, the Opening the Archives Project partnered with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Brazilian Arquivo Nacional, and the National Security Archive at George Washington University in a joint effort to preserve crucial documentation by creating digital copies accessible online.

During the summer of 2013, a team of undergraduates from Brown University and the Universidade Estadual de Maringá scanned 9,872 U.S. State Department documents on Brazil produced between 1963 and 1973, about half of NARA’s holdings for the period under consideration. The period from 1964 to 1969 was especially turbulent and historically significant in twentieth-century Brazilian history. For that reason, the Opening the Archives Project decided to concentrate on this particular five-year time span for the first phase of operations. A second team of students returned to College Park, Maryland in the summer of 2014 to continue the digitizing and indexing several thousand more documents that will be uploaded to the website as they are processed. A third team of students has begun similar work at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts.

Contributors to this project include James Green (Principal Investigator), Ashley Champagne (CDS Lead) Joseph Rhoads (Digital Technologies), Benjamin Cail (Digital Technologies).

Funding for this project comes from the Population Studies and Training Center, the Social Sciences Research Institute, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Center for Digital Scholarship.