CNSAS is one of the major archive holders in present day Romania. Its holdings contain classic paper files, microfiches, audio and video materials, as well as microfilms. The main corpus of documents consists of over 2.000.000 files produced by the former Securitate (27.000 metres of archive) and continues to grow.

The holdings of the CNSAS archive are organized as follows:

1. surveillance files for the people who were under the Securitate surveillance;
2. collaborators’ files for the people registered as Securitate collaborators;
3. documentary files regarding specific problems, e.g. “bourgeois” political parties, religion, art and culture; press and censorship; or listeners to foreign radio stations;
4. files transferred from the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania (SIE) which are usually microfilms of documents regarding operations the Securitate carried out abroad;
5. files belonging to the correspondence fund, which are generally internal administrative documents of the Securitate; and 
6. manuscripts, i.e., original manuscripts confiscated by the Securitate.
7. The documents from the CNSAS archive have been transferred from the institutions that took them into custody immediately after 1989, of which the most important are: the Romanian Intelligence Service (Serviciul Român de Informaţii – SRI), the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania (Serviciul de Informaţii Externe – SIE), the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of National Defence, and the Ministry of Administration and Internal Affairs.

The process of appraisal and transfer of the documents produced by the Securitate was a protracted and difficult one that spanned over a long period of time: it was started in 2000 and it is still going on.

The process of digitizing the holdings of the CNSAS archive has become a priority for the institution. On the one hand, the use of documents in digital form permits the protection and preservation of documents that are intensely read and, therefore, in danger of being damaged or destroyed forever. On the other hand, the creation of a digital library – which is envisaged for the near future, will ease significantly the access of the researchers to the CNSAS archive and the release of the copies from documents they request. The digitizing process has been initiated in 2006 and has been accelerated significantly beginning in 2010, when new equipment dedicated to digitizing both written documents and microfilms was acquired.