This is the first note in a new series on how the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) 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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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).…
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.…
[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.…
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.…
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.…
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).…