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The Holy See’s archives contain scrolls, parchments and leather-bound volumes with correspondence dating back more than 1,000 years. High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have now been published in a book. The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots. The book documents the Roman Catholic Church’s often hostile dealings with the world of science and the arts, including documents from the heresy trial against Galileo and...

President Barack Obama has apparently issued a long-awaited executive order on classification that fulfills one of his campaign promises by setting up a National Declassification Center to oversee the release of historical documents. But the announcement, ironically, is shrouded in secrecy and confusion. "While the Government must be able to prevent the public disclosure of information that would compromise the national security, a democratic government accountable to the people must be as transparent as possible and must not withhold information for self-serving reasons or simply to avoid embarrassment," National Security Council official William Leary wrote in a blog post announcing...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- With millions of documents filling almost 53 miles of shelf space, the Vatican Secret Archives obviously still hold some secrets. Despite the aura of mystery surrounding the archives, the Vatican actually encourages academics to research its holdings and has worked with a Belgian publishing house to bring 105 of the most important, or curious, documents to the public. The coffee-table book, "The Vatican Secret Archives," was published by VdH Books in Dutch, English, French and Italian. Cardinal Raffaele Farina, the Vatican archivist, wrote in the introduction that he knows popular books and movies love to imply...

Once upon a time (at the zenith of 20th century analog media), maintaining an on-site, in-house library crammed full of archived periodicals and rows and rows of hefty, solemn reference books, was all the rage at large media organizations. In 2009, not so much. Today, yet another bricks-and-mortar media bibliothèque fell victim to the digital age. This afternoon, in an email to his staff, David Westin, the president of ABC News, announced that ABC News will be converting its existing research library on the second floor of its 47th street building into a smaller, more cyber-focused "Digital Research Facility." "Our...

A massive amount of sensitive, national security-related information from the Clinton administration has gone missing from the national archives. The Inspector General of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told congressional committee staffers Tuesday that a hard drive containing over a terabyte of information -- the equivalent of millions of books--went missing from the NARA facility in College Park, Md., sometime between October 2008 and March 2009. The Department of Justice and the Secret Service are conducting an investigation, but it's so far unclear whether the drive was lost as the result of a crime or an accident. That...

Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of fraudulent Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears. The evidence of forgery and manipulation of images of official documents, triggered by Israel Insider's revelation of the collection of Hawaii birth certificate images on the Photobucket site and the detective work of independent investigative journalists and imaging professionals in the three weeks since the publication of the images, implicate the Daily Kos,...

Washington, DC…The Office of the Federal Register has created an Electronic Public Inspection Desk to provide free worldwide electronic access to public documents. For the first time in the 72-year existence of the daily Federal Register, the documents on file are available for viewing anytime, anywhere. Every Federal business day, anyone with access to a computer now can read critical documents governing Federal regulations relating to business, health, and safety as soon as the documents are placed on file.

Footnote.com partnered with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to link the service records and casualty reports to each name on the Wall. “The records of the Vietnam War in the National Archives are essential resources for veterans to revisit their history and establish their rights,” explains Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein. “These extensive files are mined by scholars every day as they continue to interpret and understand this pivotal period in American history.” Footnote.com will also be digitizing National Archives photos from the Vietnam War. Footnote.com and the National Archives Launch an Interactive Vietnam War MemorialAbout...

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Hillary Rodham Clinton's daily schedules as first lady will be forwarded to former President Clinton by Friday for review, the first of two steps without a fixed time limit before any are released to the public, the National Archives said Wednesday. Former President Clinton will have 30 days — possibly longer, if he requests an extension — to review the 10,000 pages of his wife's daily schedules before they will be sent to the White House for its review, said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives. The Bush administration does not have a time limit to review the...

After more than 60 years, Nazi documents stored in a vast warehouse in Germany were unsealed Wednesday, opening a rich resource for Holocaust historians and for survivors to delve into their own tormented past. The archive's index refers to 17.5 million people in its 16 linear miles of files. The treasure of documents could open new avenues of study into the inner workings of Nazi persecution from the exploitation of slave labor to the conduct of medical experiments. The archive's managers planned a conference of scholars next year to map out its unexplored contents. The files entrusted to the International...

Amazing: Bill Clinton complains media is not reporting Hillary's record - the same record that both he and Hillary are keeping hidden in the archives!Read it all here!

WASHINGTON - A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against. U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails in violation of federal law. The White House is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government and the National Security Archive. The organizations allege the disappearance of 5 million White...

Let’s face it: the Clintons will say anything in their quests for the presidency. Just as Bill Clinton railed against Republican corruption in 1992, promising his would be “the most ethical administration in history,” Hillary Clinton now is presenting herself as the antidote of the Republican “culture of corruption,” and the antithesis of the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy. What makes this argument all the more laughable is that secrecy has always been their modus operandi, and their key method of their scandal damage control. It’s on display again. In the October 30 Democratic debate on MSNBC, Tim Russert asked...

Hillary Clinton’s top advisers charge that the presidential candidate was unfairly targeted by moderator Tim Russert during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Philadelphia. Russert asked Clinton a number of tough questions during the MSNBC-sponsored debate, including one on Social Security and another on the release of documents from the Bill Clinton administration, as she sought to fend off attacks from her Democratic rivals. Mark Penn, Clinton’s senior strategist, said: “Russert made it appear that President Clinton had done something new or unusual” in regard to the release of documents. “I think there will be further clarification.” Penn and Jonathan Mantz,...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady.

MOSCOW. July 8 (Interfax) - The Federal Security Service has been assisting the United States in investigating crimes against humanity. "Since 1994, 60,000 pages of documents dealing with Nazi crimes during World War II, kept at the FSB's Central Archives, have been handed over to the United States," Vasily Khristoforov, the head of the FSB's Register and Archives Department, said in an interview with Interfax. Cooperation between American and Russian law enforcement and judiciary agencies led to a court ruling to deprive a Nazi accomplice in the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto of American citizenship, he said. Copies of trophy...

(snip) From 1940 to 1975, the F.B.I. carried out an intense campaign of covert surveillance against the National Lawyers Guild, an organization founded in 1937 and long associated with the labor movement and liberal causes. As Colin Moynihan reports in The Times, the F.B.I. turned over copies of some 400,000 pages from its files on the group under a 1977 lawsuit. In 1997, the copies were donated by the guild’s lawyers to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University with the understanding that they could be made available to the public this year.

His own collection reportedly numbers over 20,000 volumes, but that didn't keep the book-loving B16 -- who's compared sitting in his own library to being "surrounded by friends" -- from soaking up his trip to the Vatican Library and Archives yesterday. Sure, Benedict spoke of his thwarted desire to retire at 70 and "dedicate [him]self" to being a "passionate scholar" of the texts and manuscripts contained in the Vatican's vaults... but a shot like this goes a long way toward reinforcing that the Pope's confession to the staff was much more than just words on a page.PHOTO: L'Osservatore

Thank you to all our Hall of Famers and to all of you who have become part of our Finest Family ... as regular contributors and supporters who drop in every day to say hello.? We wouldn't be here without you. : ) It's been ALMOST 5 YEARS since we started The Finest, and every quarter I've posted a thread with links to all of our threads of the past three months. This one, Hall of Fame #19, brings us up to date through yesterday's Military Monday, but it will be the last one; so if you're interested in...