It had been a while since I visited the JFK ARC pages at NARA, so I was pleasantly surprised this morning to see that a new version of the Assassination Collection Reference System (ACRS) database has been posted in the form of six excel files, apparently added in mid-June 2021.…
Category Archives: JFK database
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.…
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.…
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.…
Gaps in the ACRS: A note from NARA
[First posted on March 13, 2019, at rgr-cyt.org.]
I have done a couple of posts about the agencies whose records are missing from the Assassination Collection Reference System (ACRS), the on-line database of finding-aids for the JfK Assassination Records Collection at NARA.1 I emailed NARA about the problem a while ago and have recently heard back from them.…
A note on ACRS “audit history”
[First posted on July 5, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
In my previous post I noted that a field in the metadata form (RIF) had been changed at some point in the early 2000s for a number of records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC). This change made it a very difficult task to identify a number of records in the Mary Ferrell collection of ARC records, a pity if you are trying to squeeze the maximum use out of the great MF collection.…
“Missing” RIFs at NARA
[First posted on April 28, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
It was difficult to come up with a snappy title for this post. Scare quotes around the word missing are a compromise. Otherwise it was something like “RIF forms that were completed but not included in NARA’s on-line database of ARC finding aids.”…