Category Archives: Collection issues

Notes on the collection as a whole, including its history, management, and access issues.

Summary of December 2021 releases (updated)

I have not yet posted any notes on the December 15 releases. I may have an article on these elsewhere in the next few weeks, so I will hold off on extended discussion for now. Following is just a quick summary of the records posted on NARA’s website.

Agency totals

Totals of records released per agency (the number in parentheses is the agency prefix):

# agency record count percent
1 CIA (104) 958 64%
2 FBI (124) 355 24%
3 HSCA (180) 106 7%
4 SSCIA (157) 24 2%
5 Ford Lib (178) 15 1%
6 ACSI/IRR (194) 11 < 1%
7 OSA (198) 5 < 1%
8 JFK Lib (176) 5 < 1%
9 JCS (202) 3 < 1%
10 DOS (119) 3 < 1%
11 LBJ Lib (177) 2 < 1%
12 NARA/WC (179) 2 < 1%
13 NSC (145) 1 < 1%
14 NARA (181) 1 < 1%

Newly released records

One surprise in the December releases was to see 70 78 records which were not previously released in 2017-2018.…

Biden’s memo

President Biden has finally spoken on the release of records under the JFK Act. In a memo released October 22, 2021, Biden ordered NARA to begin preparation for further releases, including putting the entire JFK Assassination Records Collection online. The memo is available here.

A closer look

The memo is long, specifying lots more paperwork for agencies (primarily the CIA) who want to continue redacting their documents, plus short term, mid term, and long term plans for release of more info.…

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.…

Redaction counts in the ARC

[First posted on January 14, 2019, at rgr-cyt.org.]

In my recent posts on the JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC), I have been looking at some of the fine (even trivial) details of the most recent release of redacted texts in the Collection. This post steps back to look at totals for all seven releases of documents in 2017-2018.…