The National Declassification Center (NDC) will be hosting its second Open Public Forum on Tuesday August 23 at 10:00 in the McGowan Theater at Archives I in Washington DC.  Please enter via the special events entrance on Constitution Avenue.  NDC Director Sheryl Shenberger and Presidential Materials Staff Director Nancy Smith will provide an update on [...]

Although the Bi-annual Report  provides the high points for the NDC, particularly in relation to the efforts to address the back log, I want to offer a few more descriptive details just to further your understanding of what we are doing. I welcome your questions and comments. Declassification can be a complex process, but the [...]

The NDC is pleased to release its Third Bi-Annual status report. This report details the progress made since January 2010 in meeting the President’s December 29, 2009 charge to eliminate the approximately 400 million page back log of reviewed, but not publicly available records at NARA.   The report specifically focuses on progress made during the [...]

Quality control review is one of the most important parts of the NDC process. In the early days of Executive Order 12958, agencies began to expand review programs to ensure that sensitive information was not released when the automatic declassification deadline arrived. To accomplish their goals, programs were established before sufficient government wide equity recognition [...]

When NARA established the National Declassification Center (NDC) in December 2009, we included the unit that processes classified FOIA and MDR requests for accessioned Federal records.  To establish the NDC and the new declassification processes, NARA applied Lean- Six-Sigma (LSS) methodology, including defining a problem, measuring output, analyzing alternatives and developing an improved “to be” [...]

Hello NDC blog readers. In recent weeks there have have been  several discussions with people in the declassification world and the general public about the declassification process and how it has changed since the NDC was established. We at the NDC are working to make our process as transparent as possible to help people understand how we perform [...]

The NDC second Bi-Annual report is now available here.  http://www.archives.gov/declassification/reports/2010-biannual-january1-december31.pdf  Highlights include implementation of new processes to identify and evaluate records in the backlog (over 80 million pages assessed to date), continued inter-agency collaboration, and the establishment of two special projects to review records relating to the Berlin Wall and Pentagon Papers.  I invite you to [...]

In marking the release of the first Bi-Annual NDC status report, Director Sheryl Shenberger noted.  “It has become clear to me that all the agencies involved in this effort want to make the NDC a success story.”  I think this captures what the NDC accomplished during its first six months of operation.  We were able [...]