Welcome to the Adams Center’s Secretaries of Defense Records Project. The centerpiece of our efforts is the Secretaries of Defense Records Research Assistant, a path-breaking conversational tool that makes the underused Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) searchable and accessible for the first time.

OSD records (NARA Record Group 330) are largely unprocessed and lack researcher-friendly finding aids. As a result, scholars of military, Cold War, and diplomatic history have rarely consulted this vast and important source. OSD sits at the pinnacle of the defense establishment, secures the largest appropriations from Congress, and is first link beneath the president in the military chain of command. The offices and agencies under OSD have been involved in diplomacy, arms control, civil rights, arms sales, strategic partnerships, and a broad array of scientific research and development, just to name a few. The collection deserves scholarly attention.

The Adams Center’s project has gathered, digitized, and organized a variety of windows into the RG 330. Standard form 135 (SF-135) inventories were completed by OSD each time it retired a body of records; the project digitized these and made them searchable. Federal historians in the departments of Defense and State have special access and cite RG 330 more often in their publications than anyone; we gathered more than 11,0009 of these citations, which provide further visibility. And finally, file units and items flagged by or digitized by the National Archives rounded out the collection. We now have a searchable database for over half of the document series that make up RG 300.

The OSD-prepared SF-135s were not created as finding aids and often contain cryptic and incomplete descriptions. Because of this, simple keyword searching across this data would miss important documents. The project tackled this issue by using large language models in the database design and search. This allows for searching based on concepts and broad research questions, rather than simple word matching. The researcher can engage with a virtual assistant that has access to reference material, including ten volumes of the Secretaries of Defense Historical Series and the DoD’s decimal filing system, for help in navigating the archive.

The project continues to add material and has undertaken a major effort to digitize and include full text documents from key accessions. The coming months will also see an effort to visualize the archive, allowing researchers to find patterns and clusters in the data. The project welcomes feedback (see the feedback tab in the tool itself) and would especially appreciate accounts of what searches have uncovered.