The blog thanks Christopher Straughn for this amazingly well-crafted infographic of the history of state documents classifications in the United States, which is based on his 2023 poster session at the American Library Association Conference.
By juxtaposing a set of timelines, this chronology allows one to trace the origins of state documents classifications. Find out about the influence of archives on American classification, and how external political and military events in the 1970s shaped the growth of government documents classification systems.
Please be sure to share this gem with government document librarians you know!
Straughn is the Continuing Resources Librarian, Government Documents Coordinator, and
Liaison to Linguistics, Philosophy, and TESOL at Northeastern Illinois University Libraries. He can be reached at castraughn@neiu.edu