I’m posting this note for my own reference. Feel free to ignore this if you are not trying to understand the ins and outs of the FBI multi-record releases.
What is a multi-record pdf?
A multi-record pdf is a pdf which includes more than one ARC record. There is nothing special about this, you can make your own, like I do, if you have the right software. NARA, however, usually doesn’t do this with the ARC records it posts online. It sticks to one record per pdf. This is convenient for people who try to keep track of releases, and no doubt for NARA as well.
Starting in the December 2017 ARC releases, however, the FBI began supplying pdfs to NARA that incorporated more than one record. Why? I speculate it was because the FBI was going through a large set of previously unreleased case files.
As a matter of FBI convenience (I guess), releases from these files followed the case file order. These new releases were often very long, hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages long.
Chopping them up into small pieces would perhaps cause analysts confusion, so the releases came out in pdfs for (mostly) one case file. Case files in turn are divided into sections and, at the bottom, serials.
To see which sections and serials of FBI case files map onto ARC records, one must look first at the JFK database, which tells you what FBI serials are in an ARC record, then look at FBI internal file numbering. Not every page of an FBI case file has these numbers, so one must often flip back and forth through the file, looking for where one serial ends and another begins.
NARA did release excel sheets that gave some of the info you needed to figure this out, but you really need the big JFK database to make sure you are assigning the right ARC record numbers to the right multi-rec pdfs.
There is one more complication here. When we have a NARA pdf for an ARC record, the pdf filename is usually the 13 digit ARC record number. This is of course about as convenient as one can hope for. But these FBI multi-record pdfs have more than one record. What do you do here?
For December 2017 through June 2023, NARA used its own internal file numbering to name these pdfs. This is indicated by a pdf filename that starts with “docid-” and ends with an 8 digit number, e.g. docid-32989579.pdf, etc.
In addition to pdf filenames, NARA’s internal file number also appears on each page of the pdf, together with the page number.
This allows one to keep track of where you are in these pdfs quite accurately, at the expense of juggling two different numbering systems: the ARC RIF record numbering system, and NARA’s internal eight digit numbers. These are linked by the FBI file numbering, as described above.
As you might imagine, all of this has made it a bean counter’s nightmare to keep track of FBI multi-record releases.
MFF and the multi-record releases
For those who really know their way around the ARC, the first thing you ask when confronted with complicated file issues is “How does the MFF online collection handle these?”
Why? To repeat (for the nth time), the Mary Ferrell Foundation website is the leading source for ARC documents, providing accurate access to all records ARC related. This is due largely to Foundation President Rex Bradford, who has done a remarkable job of making the complex ARC releases available in a comprehensible fashion.
When it comes to the multi-record pdfs, Bradford undoubtedly knows the ins and outs of these better than anyone else, including NARA and the FBI itself. How has he handled these pdfs?
Splitting the pdfs
The MFF solution to the 2017 December multi-rec pdfs was to simply split them into their components. How did this work? Here is an example.
This is the first page of the multi-rec pdf docid-32989725.pdf. Note that this is the December 2017 version of the pdf:
The pdf has 317 pages, counting this cover sheet. This page shows us six FBI case file numbers. This means that there are six ARC records in the pdf. To find the ARC record number (aka RIF number) for each of these case file numbers, you can use the excel sheet for the 2017-2018 ARC releases posted at NARA (available here). Just search for the filename.
Putting these in table form For the 2017 releases, we get:
| # | RIF # | FBI # | pages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 124-10273-10072 | 62-116464-74 THRU 1ST NR 76 | 307-317 | |
| 2 | 124-10273-10074 | 62-116464-77X THRU 82 | 266-306 | |
| 3 | 124-10273-10076 | 62-116464-83, 84 | 254-259 | |
| 4 | 124-10273-10078 | 62-116464-86 THRU 102X | 53-253 | |
| 5 | 124-10273-10080 | 62-116464-104 THRU 110 | 2-52 |
Note that NARA’s excel sheet for December 2017 record releases does not have an entry for the 4th case file number “1ST NR 82”. It is there, on pages 260 to 265, but was not counted as a release in NARA’s excel sheet (don’t know why).
The 32989725 compilation was released again in 2018. Again, not all of the “records” were listed on the NARA’s 2018 excel sheet. Following are the records which were listed:
| # | RIF # | FBI # | pages | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 124-10273-10072 | 62-116464-74 THRU 1ST NR 76 | 307-317 | |
| 2 | 124-10273-10074 | 62-116464-77X THRU 82 | 266-306 | |
| 3 | 124-10273-10075 | 62-116464-83, 84 | 260-265 | |
| 5 | 124-10273-10080 | 62-116464-104 THRU 110 | 2-52 |
The two records which were in the 2017 list, and not in the 2018 list, were released in full in December 2017, so of course they did not appear again. The other records still had redactions in 2017, so more releases were made in 2018.
Needless to say, the FBI’s failure to provide these records in individual releases has made it super hard to go through and see which records were released in full and which were not.
These 2017-2018 records are neatly presented on MFF, however, as a look at the links I gave to the MFF website will show. This is because Rex Bradford had the time and the know-how to split the multi-doc pdfs into individual docs.
This is real work, since there are tens of thousands of pages involved. Note in particular that the number of pages in each record is nowhere to be found in the original ARC documentation; not in the JFK database, and not in the NARA excel sheets for the 2017-2018 releases.
Why was number of pages not indicated for these records? According to the FBI these records are NAR: “Not assassination related.” For all such records, the FBI did not supply number of pages in their identification aids.
Thus Bradford got these numbers by flipping through the multi-doc pdf and eyeballing the FBI file numbers hand-written on each page. Hats off to Rex!
Merging the pdfs
In addition to the multi-doc pdfs, there is another kind of pdf which you might call a “multi-part” pdf. This involves ARC records which were posted at NARA in several pieces. Obviously these records were in most cases quite long.
Take for example ARC 124-10183-10291. This is a “bulky” FBI record, case file number 62-116395-477 BULKY”. The version of this “bulky” FBI file posted at MFF is 3132 pages long. It was posted at NARA in four parts: docid-32989525,docid-32989526,docid-32989527, and docid-32989528.
Each of these parts begins with a cover sheet with the file number, and each is listed separately on NARA’s 2018 excel sheet, so the fact that these were separate pieces of one file took me a while to figure out. The FBI’s failure to provide the number of pages for NAR files was particularly confusing here.
MFF merged all of these “multipart” files on their website, so that when you click on 124-10183-10291, you get the whole file all at once. This is of course the correct solution.
There are about a dozen FBI case files that were released in multiple parts in December 2017, so this is a small group, but they add up to many thousands of pages. ALL of these are from case file 62-118395. For those who have a memory for numbers, I have discussed this case file several times on the blog. This was the FBI administrative file for the Church Committee investigation. Virtually all of this is NAR
Two cents
There are many, many problems with these multi-record (and multi-part) pdfs. NARA is more or less stuck with what the agencies give them, so blame the FBI here, not NARA. The result of whatever savings in time the FBI got out of releasing records this way has been long term confusion and error for everyone else. Bad FBI, bad!
On the other hand, those with subscriptions to the MFF on-line collection have gotten an incredible deal, thanks to the great work of Rex Bradford. Because of the extremely messy problems the FBI pdfs have created, there are still hard to resolve issues. In particular, MFF does not handle post-2017 releases of multi-record pdfs as thoroughly as it does the December 2017 set. I will post on these problems in the near future.