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).…
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.…
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.…
I have been looking at the ARC records released by NARA on 26 April 2018 again, and there is at least one error identifying a record.
NARA 18 lists the record 104-10012-10037; it is available here
In fact, this record has the identification sheet for ARC 104-10012-10037 on top of it, but the document that follows the sheet is not ARC 104-10012-10037.…
The Mary Ferrell Foundation is my main source for ARC documents. I have a professional membership which allows me to download as many pdfs from their huge collection as I wish. I have very seldom had problems with this service, but after a lapse of several months without downloading anything, I have run into an odd glitch.…
Just when I think I’ve squeezed all the data out of the various sources for the JFK ARC, another drop comes out. After checking NARA’s main page for the 2017-2018 releases, I discovered that there were two more pdf files I had not previously downloaded.
The page, www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release, features a fancy html table that gives all the data from the NARA18 spreadsheet online — or so I thought.…