(1:30 p.m. EDT)

Well, thank you very much, Grant [Green], and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. And let me, before proceeding, thank Grant personally for the hard work that he has put into this effort and all the members of the M family, our management family, who have worked so hard on this very, very important project. And I join all of you in welcoming the distinguished Chief Record Keeper of the United States of America, Mr. John Carlin, who you'll hear from in a moment.

We gather here in the Ben Franklin Room to celebrate the opening of a new era of even closer cooperation between the State Department and NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration. Thanks to our joint efforts, unprecedented millions of people at home and abroad will have access to the historical record of American foreign policy. The fruits of our partnership demonstrate what can be accomplished under the President's management agenda and his e-government initiatives.

Not coincidentally, we have come together on a very special day, Thomas Jefferson's birthday. Jefferson is a great hero of mine. One of the rooms to our -- to my right, your left -- is named after him, and I have discovered recently one more reason to admire him. I should have known this all along, but I had overlooked it or forgotten it. Jefferson not only served as our nation's first Secretary of State, Jefferson also was our nation's first Archivist of the United States. And Jefferson famously swore, "Upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Jefferson, Franklin and our other founding fathers understood that in order to fight against that kind of tyranny, there needed to be the freest possible flow of information to the citizens of the United States, and there had to be accountable systems of government which would serve as powerful safeguards against any tyranny; information available to the people on how the people's business was conducted. It isn't surprising then, that Jefferson placed such high importance on carrying out his duties as our nation's Archivist.

Here at the State Department, we review and transfer to the National Archives nearly 15 million pages of historical records every single year. And every one of those 15 million pages comes across my desk in the course of a year. (Laughter.)

Today, we build on that tradition as we transfer the first tranche of the State Department's electronic archive. This electronic archive you see before you, which we will pass in a few moments, encompasses nearly 700,000 records documenting diplomacy from 1973 and 1974. NARA will make these records accessible on demand at desktops all across the world. That is a landmark achievement for our federal government, and a testament to our democracy in action.

As inventor -- an inventor like Jefferson would also be delighted to know that the State Department and NARA are applying advanced technology to ensure that in the years ahead historical information will be more efficiently declassified and made available to the public.

Let me briefly provide some perspective on what we have been doing here in the State Department with respect to using modern technology for these purposes. Let me tell you about the new information system that we are also putting in place that takes advantage of this modern technology.

When I arrived here in 2001, most of our employees did not yet have desktop Internet access. Last year, we completed the upgrade of our unclassified system so that every employee in the department, not only here in the State main building, in the Truman building, but every one of our embassies around the world, now has access to the Internet with broadband capability. And over these three years, we have put in place over 44,000 computers with that capability.

In 2001, the State Department was still using World War II technology to power our classified cable system. Today, that is still true, but the situation is about to change with the introduction of a program we call SMART, S-M-A-R-T; and it stands for State Messaging and Archiving Retrieval Toolset. How's that for getting an acronym out of that to SMART? (Laughter.)

SMART will replace our classified and unclassified legacy systems, the systems of old. Instead, we're going to have a single, integrated system encompassing both our classified and unclassified systems. We have to expect that some 3,000, and we plan for some 3,000, Department employees to be testing this SMART system before the end of the year. And then we'll have a full-scale rollout beginning in 2005.

SMART will make it possible for modern messaging and information sharing and much more efficient archiving to be available to everyone in the Department. We want to change the way we think about messaging and information storage and retrieval, as well. We want to get rid of the old cable system. We want to get rid of so many of the memos we now use and make everything increasingly electronic using the power of the Internet, the power of these new tools that technology sciences have provided to us.

In just a few minutes, John Carlin and I will sign a Memorandum of Understanding that takes our interagency collaboration even further. The Memorandum of Understanding will launch a joint research effort involving SMART, our new system, and NARA's Electronics Record Archives Program.

This pilot project will test a system that is designed to make it easier for the State Department to share, store and vet electronic information. The system is also designed to make it easier to transfer records that warrant historical preservation, to transfer those records to NARA in a more manageable form so that they can be more easily accessible to the public. If this pilot project is successful, the model may be adopted by the entire U.S. Government; and we certainly intend for it to be successful.

My friends, the impressive interagency cooperation we salute today and the new technologies that hold out such promise, such great promise for the future, for historians, for the average citizen -- this is the result of the work of hundreds of people here at the State Department and at NARA, and so many of you here today. And I hope you are as proud of what you have accomplished as I am. Your fellow citizens and American democracy owe a great debt to all of you for your hard work.

Jefferson, my good friend, "TJ," as we call him here in the Department -- (laughter) -- would be very, very, very proud of each and every one of you. And so thank you for what you've done.

And now it is my great pleasure to introduce a distinguished public servant, entrepreneur, educator, the former Governor of Kansas, and Thomas Jefferson's successor as our nation's Chief Record Keeper, John W. Carlin, The Archivist of the United States.

(Applause.)

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