After a long wait, NARA has finally posted some of the results of its digitization plan for the Assassination Records Collection. This is no minor addition–I am not finished counting pages, and so far there are over 600,000. The link announcing the latest records is here.

What’s in the new releases?

The vast majority of these docs are Warren Commission records. As we already knew, there is very little new material here.

The new copies of these old documents, however, are all done as TIF image files, and in many cases seem to be better quality than other on-line copies. So that’s a plus. For those who are worried about hidden comments, we also have the back side of each and every page. As you can imagine, this wildly inflates the page count, but any way you count, there are mountains of pages.

In addition to WC docs, there are many new items, including the heretofore largely missing NSC records. These records were omitted from the JFK Database entirely, presumably because the disks with the record data on them were scrongled, and could not be loaded into the database tables.

Constant readers of the JFKARC discovered the existence of these NSC records only when NARA posted 48 of them in 2017-2018. These were posted because the versions at NARA were previously redacted. All of these redactions are now released online. These latest releases, however, also include an additional 226 NSC records that were not previously available on line. I’m looking forward to reading these, along with thousands of other interesting records. It will take at least a few weeks more to go through all this stuff, however, so don’t hold your breath for a post tomorrow.

Two cents

I’d like to congratulate NARA for this huge new addition to the online ARC records, but I have to say that they certainly made it hard to access the stuff in a systematic way.

I spent days trying to figure out a way to automate the download process, then more days trying to figure out how to convert the pages into record sized pdfs without a ton of blank back sides of pages. NASA has even done OCR on these pages, but in clicky html boxes that I did not even attempt to access. Hopefully someone will sooner or later provide these records in a more usable format.