About 15 percent of that budget comes from royalties generated by its various publications, all based on its extensive collection of holdings. The Archive got its start in 1985 when Scott Armstrong, a Watergate-era Washington Post investigative reporter, got together with others of his ilk to pool resources. They combined their personal FOIA collections into a one-stop shop for declassified documents. Before the Archive existed, hundreds of linear feet of previously unpublished government documents collected by individual researchers were gathering mildew in dozens of basements, useless to anyone else who might want to follow their paper trails. Each of the Archive's more than 100,000 documents is meticulously indexed and cross-referenced with others in the collection and stored as a huge, searchable database.
Extensive indexing allows keyword searches of names, dates, etc.
Using this search method it's possible to trace a single person or activity across several years, via a paper trail that might have taken weeks or months to trace by hand. But the Archive holds only a fraction of the millions of secrets which, according to Blanton, should be declassified. You see documents coming across the transom that tell whole new stories and revise history as we've previously known it. While the Archive has gathered extensive materials on major issues such as the Iran-Contra affair, the Cuba Missile Crisis, and the Afghanistan conflict, it's also working with contemporary issues facing the Clinton administration. For example, the Archive has filed FOIAs to get classified international policy documents on the Bosnian conflict.