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.…
Author Archives: Robert Reynolds
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.…
Just another list: NARA 20
As noted earlier, the ACRS, NARA’s on-line database of metadata for documents in the JFK Assassination Records Collection, 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.…
Mary Ferrell pdf problem fixed
Thank you, Mary Ferrell tech support, for fixing the pdf problem I noted previously. Fixing this saves me a lot of work rewriting every pdf to repair the header.…
Unredacted: The FBI files on John Caesar Grossi (II)
In my last post I discussed my interest in John Caesar Grossi and did a lengthy review of case file 43-5359, the first FBI file on Grossi in the ARC (hereafter File 1). In this post, I originally planned to review case file 88-30913, the second big FBI file on Grossi in the ARC (hereafter File 2).…
Unredacted: The FBI files on John Caesar Grossi (I)
One of the things I noticed while going over the 2017-2018 releases from the ARC was a set of FBI files on a man named John Caesar (or Cesar) Grossi. These files turned out to be suprisingly numerous and hard to keep track of. Based on some of the work I’ve done recently, I now have a much better understanding of why that was so.…
Filling the gaps in the ACRS: Three sets of FBI records
The Assassination Collection Reference System (ACRS) is NARA’s online database of finding aids for the JFKARC. This post discusses three sets of FBI records in the ARC which are not listed in the ACRS. Using the Mary Farrell Foundation’s online collection, ARC documents posted online at NARA, and ARRB record notices published in the Federal Register, I have put together an excel file of the missing data which is available here.…