Olin & Uris Libraries

Printer-friendly version

Foreign Broadcast Information Service Documents

Information about FBIS

Designed to provide the Allies an advantage during WW II, FBIS, and its successor, has the added potential to be a critical resource for academic scholars, yet the scholarly community's lack of familiarity with open source methods and the FBIS collection in particular, has limited academic use of the FBIS archive. That archive already includes some of the material mentioned in Hayden's [General Michael Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence, 2004] speech--print, broadcast, and Internet-derived material--translated into English and tagged by country and topic and is an unparalleled resource for understanding news content throughout the world across the last half-century.

FBIS reports became widely available for public use, in print and microfiche forms, in 1974, when the Commerce Department's National Technical Information Service (NTIS) began commercial distribution of the material. In his 1992 speech, Admiral Studeman indicated a strong appreciation of the private-sector and academic research that had arisen out of FBIS's availability outside the US government and expressed a commitment to its continued availability. As he noted, "FBIS's customers in both the intelligence and policy communities value the work of private-sector scholars and analysts who avail themselves of our material and contribute significantly to the national debate on contemporary issues."

The following year, 1993, FBIS began to distribute CDs of its material to Federal Depository Libraries, a practice that lasted until June 2004, when FBIS began Internet-only distribution through Dialog Corporation's World News Connection (WNC) service which licenses the material from the US government. This Web-based portal offers hourly updates and full text keyword searching of FBIS material from January 1996 to the present.

The CD collection [located in our Electronic Text Center collection in 104 Olin] allows greater flexibility in accessing reports than the Dialog interface. Dialog only displays 10 results at a time and offers limited interactive refinement capabilities. The inaugural CD issued in 1993 covers a period of nearly one year, but only a small number of reports are included for the period November 1992-June 1993. July-September 1993 is fully covered. Thereafter, into June 2004, each distributed CD covered periods of three months.

[Slightly edited version of the text on page 21 of Kalev Leetaru, "The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979-2008 (U)", Studies in Intelligence Vol. 54, No. 1 (Extracts, March 2010): 17-37. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/volume-54-number-1/PDFs-Vol.-54-No.1/U-%20Studies%2054no1-FBIS-BBC-Coverage-Web.pdf]

For further background on the uses of FBIS in the intelligence community, see [Admiral] William Studeman, "Teaching the Giant to Dance: Contradictions and Opportunities in Open Source Within the Intelligence Community," presented at First International Symposium on Open Source Solutions. Available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/fbis/studem.html

Updated 22 November 2010
Research & Learning Services
URL: http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/fbisguide.html