What does the National Security Research Center Do?

I’m often asked this question. The answer is actually quite complex, but my initial response is simple: Information.

The more in-depth explanation begins at “preservation” and ends with “accessibility” and “dissemination.” Linking these efforts together explains why we do what we do, and it’s this part of the answer that’s truly noble. Let me explain.

In making this information discoverable, NSRC staff (there are about 60 of us) must ensure its preservation, accessibility, and dissemination. This happens through the interconnected work of seven teams: the collections management team, historian team, librarian team, knowledge management team, publications team, and two digitization teams.

Their efforts allow what may be, in the most extreme cases, 80-year-old, one-of-a-kind deteriorating media to be curated, restored, and shared with weapons researchers or interested general audiences. One such example on the technical side is bomb books, which are one-stop-shop packages of information for new generations of weapons researchers. Examples on the non-technical side include fulfilling Freedom of Information Act requests about UFOs (and many other subjects), digitizing the contents of highly flammable historic film before it deteriorates into powder, and rediscovering and then sharing long-forgotten photos of first Lab Director J. Robert Oppenheimer or rare footage from the Trinity test. You can read about all these examples of preservation in this issue of The Vault. You can also read about an example of what hasn’t been preserved (“The Lavender Scare” on page 26) and how we recognize the archival omissions and biases of the past as important lessons for the future.

Pondering our work prompts questions
 of who makes history and what gets to be remembered—that is, preserved, curated, and eventually disseminated.

At the NSRC, and organizations like ours, we 
are preservationists and also disseminators of information. We do one so we are able to do the other. That’s our duty and it’s an important one; knowledge empowers people in many ways, be it through advancing personal and professional achievement, fostering transparency and truth by combating false information, or facilitating education and learning.

Sometimes, the who and the what that are remembered is simply a matter of whatever is left behind, and then whether it is preserved and shared. We understand this, and we also understand that, as you’ll read in “The Lavender Scare,” an incomplete history is
 an inaccurate history. We continue to work on fulfilling our commitment to preserve information as well as share it. This is why we publish The Vault magazine.

I hope you enjoy this year’s issue and learn something, too.

Brye Ann Steeves


Director, National Security Research Center