I finally have an introductory page on the content of the ARC. Here is a link to it. There is another link on my home page as well. Let me know if you have any corrections or suggestions! …
Author Archives: Robert Reynolds
NBR files in the ARC, part 4: The Cuban Revolutionary Council
This is my fourth post on NBR records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. (See here for a general introduction to records designated NBR “not believed relevant”).
The CRC financial records
The documents I discuss in this post are financial records of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). The CRC was “an umbrella group of anti-Castro groups formed with the support of the U.S.…
Matching NARA to MFF, part 1: July 24 release
This is the first note in a new series on how the Mary Ferrell website managed to match up the records from NARA’s 2017-2018 ARC releases with the appropriate metadata and plug them in to their massive document archive.
This was a big, big job; my hat is off to them, particularly to Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford, who doubles as the MFF’s website designer and programmer.…
Three years later
I posted my first note on the JFK ARC on November 14, 2017, so I’ve been writing on this subject for three years now. I had no particular goals when I began, so I can’t speak of any accomplishments to date.
I have, however, slowly acquired a few goals along the way.…
Another day, another NARA FOIA release
This post discusses an FOIA release from NARA that came out in February 2020. The release includes a couple of record lists and NARA’s letters to President Trump on releasing material in the ARC. The release is available from NARA here. It is also available in a somewhat different format from the Government Attic website here, and from the “FOIA Online” website.…
When is a release not a release?
I have been looking at the ARC 2017-2018 releases again and there are still many questions I cannot answer. One question that I am looking at now is what makes some of these documents “releases” to begin with.
Here is an example of this problem. CIA record 104-10001-10042 was released on April 26, 2018.…
Yet another list: NARA20
As noted earlier, NARA’s on-line database of metadata for documents in the JFK Assassination Records Collection (AKA the ACRS) has been down for maintenance since the end of September 2020.
In its place is a 27M excel file which NARA describes as “listing every item in the [ACRS] database to facilitate researcher access to the information in the system” (see here).…
Re-counting records at Mary Ferrell
This is a follow-up to a note I posted over two years ago (March 2018).
That note looked at the question of how many records were listed in the ACRS, NARA’s on-line database of ARC metadata. Since the ACRS has become available on-line, with a little bit of programming one should be able to answer that question definitively; just scan and scrape it.…
ARC agency numbers
[First posted on May 4, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
For those not in the know, most (but not all) records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at NARA have finding aids called Reader Information Forms (RIFs) Each RIF has a unique 13 digit number that identifies the document. In this numbering system, the first three digits represent the agency that provided the record.…
ACRS is down
NARA’s database of finding aids for the JFK ARC is off-line. The announcement says “The JFK Assassination Collection Reference System is currently down for maintenance. During this outage, we are providing a spreadsheet listing every item in the database to facilitate researcher access to the information in the system.”
Unfortunately, the humongo spreadsheet provided lists only about half the records in the collection.…