We introduce the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) Database, a collection of over 3 million documents about state diplomacy. Substantively, our database focusses on the USA and provides opportunities to analyze previously classified (or publicly unavailable) corpora of internal government documents which include the raw—often full—text of those documents. We also provide within-country diplomatic records for the USA, UK, and Brazil. The full span of the data is 1620–2013, but it is mainly from the twentieth century. Our database allows scholars to view text and associated statistics online and to download and view customized datasets via an application programming interface. We provide extensive metadata about the documents, including the countries and persons they mention, and their topics and classification levels. The metadata includes information we extracted with domain-specific, customized natural language processing tools. To demonstrate the potential of this data, we use it to design and validate a new index for “country importance” in the context of US foreign policy priorities.

我们引入了信息自由存档（FOIArchive）数据库，该数据库收集了超过300万份有关国家外交的文件。实质上，我们的数据库集中在美国，并提供了机会来分析以前分类的（或公共上不可用的）内部政府文件的语料库，其中包括这些文件的原始文本（通常是全文）。我们还提供美国，英国和巴西的国家内部外交记录。数据的整个跨度是1620年至2013年，但主要来自20世纪。我们的数据库使学者可以在线查看文本和相关统计数据，并可以通过应用程序编程界面下载和查看自定义数据集。我们提供有关文档的广泛元数据，包括它们提到的国家和地区，主题和分类级别。元数据包括我们使用特定于域的，定制的自然语言处理工具提取的信息。为了展示这些数据的潜力，我们使用它来设计和验证一个在美国外交政策优先事项的背景下“国家重要性”的新指数。