The Cuban Missile Crisis

This week I reviewed the digital collection on the Cuban Missile Crisis from George Washington University���s National Security Archive. The archive is a repository of declassified documents obtained through various methods, including the Freedom of Information Act, by this independent, non-governmental research institute and library.

Collection Principles: This collection centers on government material from the events leading up to and immediately surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis. The collection includes declassified government documents, audio clips of White House briefings, intelligence photographs, naval documents, a chronology of the crisis, an analysis by contemporary historians, and media coverage from the 40^th Anniversary Conference in Havana.

Object Characteristics: The text documents in this collection are represented as scanned pdf files, although they do not appear to be of very high quality. The audio clips are in Real Audio and some include partial transcriptions. The images are in jpeg format and allow the user to zoom in only once. Foreign language materials include English translations.

Metadata: The metadata is somewhat lacking in this collection. All information about the text documents and images comes only from the object���s descriptive title. The audio clips do have an additional descriptive paragraph, giving the user some context. The photographs are titled by date and location or object in the image, but little other information is given about the images. The metadata found in the titles is helpful, but there is no way to search it, and the information all runs together in one long statement rather than separating it into different fields.

Audience: The whole National Security Archive in some ways is aimed at a more advanced researcher, since that would be the group of people most interested in the types of documents collected by the Archive. However, I think some of the poor reproductions and lack of a search function within the specific collection would also be frustrating for this audience. In this way the collection is more suited for the casual user who just wants to see some material associated with the crisis, and is not doing targeted research.