Category Archives: Mary Ferrell Foundation

The Mary Ferrell Foundation provides the most extensive set of ARC documents available on-line. These notes discuss various features and questions in the MFF collection.

SISS records from the ARC now on line at Mary Ferrell

Some interesting ARC docs have recently been posted online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website. These docs are records of executive session testimony before the SISS (Senate Internal Security Subcommittee), which conducted a “limited inquiry” into the JFK assassination in late 1963. The session records were acquired by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) all the way back in 1995, and are noted in the ARRB’s Final report (see here and here).…

Matching NARA to MFF, part 1: July 24 release

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.…

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.…

pdf problems at Mary Ferrell

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.…

More on the “old RIF numbers” at Mary Ferrell

[First posted on June 28, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]

This post is a continuation of my April 2018 post on the “old RIF numbers” formerly used in the JFK Assassination Record Collection (ARC) at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

This ID system is no longer used at NARA, but there are still many documents using it in the important on-line version of the ARC at the Mary Ferrell website.…

“Old RIF numbers” at Mary Ferrell

[First posted on April 11, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]

This is a very technical post. It is intended for people who are seriously interested in finding ARC documents on-line at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website. Everyone else can skip this one.

RIF documents in the ARC

The JFK Assassination Record Collection (ARC) is the great repository of all Federal agency records related to the assassination of President John F.…