A brief note today on the update to the Mary Ferrell Foundation website that happened this summer.

The MFF is the premier online source for records from the JFK Collection. Anyone seriously interested in the JFK Assassination, or in the JFK Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC), is already a subscriber to the MFF website. It is huge, it is authoritative, and it is priced for the individual researcher, not for institutions or libraries.

The recent update to the MFF website is important for people who want to make full use of all the documents online at MFF. Previously, the website search function had limitations that made some documents quite hard to find.

One especially bothersome limitation was that it was difficult to look up records that were not in the JFK Database compiled by NARA. The Database is unfortunately still incomplete, and this has meant that records online at MFF, but not in the JFK Database, could easily be overlooked. I have been bitten by this problem a number of times.

The new update has now added back all of records that were released online by NARA into its look-up table, solving many of the problems this gap caused.

Unfortunately, there are still records not yet incorporated into the JFK Database, so MFF is not giving us a total solution. This is NARA’s responsibility, and I urge them again to get on with this important work.

Another important addition to the MFF search functionality is the addition of the “old” CIA records. These records used different document identification numbers from the Reader Information Form numbers that later became standard. In the past, it was impossible to look up these old id numbers using the MFF search box. This is now possible, a very important fix for people looking for the 10,000 plus CIA records that use these numbers.

The MFF collection of essays and book look ups on the JFK assassination have also had a major long overdue update. Many of these were long unavailable due to “link rot.” That seems to have been fixed for the majority of them, though I have not had a chance to due a thorough check.

A smaller fix, but one I appreciated a lot was to mend the pdf download function. This had a minor glitch that sometimes produced slightly malformed pdfs which my software was unable to parse correctly. Very nice to have this function working again correctly.

Linking to MFF docs online is also now much more convenient. Since I often use MFF links in my blog posts, this was also something I was very happy to see.

Overall, an excellent set of fixes that have made the MFF an even more outstanding resource for researchers. Many thanks to MFF President Rex Bradford, who does a lot of the work on the MFF website himself. Keep up the good work guys!