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JFK Library Launches Largest Presidential Online Archive
Lucas123 writes "The JFK Library launched what it is calling the largest presidential online archive, offering the public 117TB of data related to John F. Kennedy's presidency. The four-year project digitized a plethora of analog material including 200,000 pages of documents; 300 reels of audio tape containing more than 1,245 individual recordings of telephone calls, speeches and meetings; 300 museum artifacts; 72 reels of film; and 1,500 photos. 'As young people increasingly rely on the Internet as their primary source for information, it is our hope that the library's online archive will allow a new generation to learn about this important chapter in American history,' said Carolyn Kennedy, the wife of the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was on hand at the opening of the archive."
to all of the Marilyn Monroe film and photos?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
Julian Assange called in for questioning regarding a MASSIVE US government data leak!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
All day during work it seemed to be down. I can get in now and it'll be interesting to sift through their material.
that's like 25,000 DVDs of Marilyn Monroe pr0n...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
small correction: Carolyn was his DAUGHTER not his wife.
"One thing can be assumed here is that many three lettered acronym departments in the governmint have scrubbed the collection top to bottom years ago."
Perhaps those three-letter acronyms have, themselves, been scrubbed from the collection.
How does the saying go? "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince people that he doesn't exist."
-kgj
You're an alarmist idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Comedian.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Didn't she die along with him, in the plane crash? The wiki says so.
Jeepers, what did /. do to this text field to make it so hard to paste a link?
Uh, what? In the Clinton years, warehouses full of documents from this time were declassified. Top Secret communications from the Bay of Pigs invasion were made unclassified, just as an example. Scores of authors pored over the documents and wrote tons of books based on them. I read one recently: Oswald and the CIA, based almost entirely on declassified documents the CIA and other intel agencies held on Oswald. I would say there is a plethora of classified documents from the Kennedy administration that have been available unclassified for 15 or more years now.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The G.W. Bush Presidentially library, which I believe contains no less than six coloring books now...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Everbody knows the Phone Company shot JFK!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
would belong to this guy.
he travelled back in time shot himself, I saw it on the BBC ;)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Carolyn Kennedy died with JFK Jr. during the plane crash. Perhaps Caroline Kennedy, his sister was on hand at the opening of the archive?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Oh yes, Dick Cheney died, all right.
Then his Zombie corpse ran for Vice-President ... and won.
-kgj
You are welcome on my lawn.
Good point. That's a lot of storage space for documents that will mainly be heavy black lines meant to protect the Hunt brothers and the Koch brothers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not that being president qualifies you in any way to light anyone else's cigar, but why argue over which former president is better than another? Is there any doubt as to which president is the most improtant? The answer is simple:
OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT! He is the only one that matters - he is the only president who can have an impact on the lives of all living Americans (and a large portion of the citizens of the earth). Debating about past presidents is a waste of time. Pay attention to the one sitting in the oval office, and spend a few extra minutes wondering who will take his place when he's done.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
Meh, give it a few months before some Google engineer gets bored and adds a couple tweaks to their indexer for the archives. Then you can use the various google features like site: to search the archives.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Do they really mean 117TB?
Some quick sums on file sizes for online digitized material:
200K pages - say a generous 100K/page = 20GB
300 reels of tape + 1245 recordings, say 1000 hours of audio at about 1MB/minute = 60GB
72 reels of film, say 50 hours at a generous 2GB/hour (DVD quality) = 100GB
1500 images + [images of] 300 artifacts at a generous 1MB each = about 2GB
Total: 182GB
What are they doing with the other 116.8 TB? Digitizing the genome of every woman he slept with?
I don't think you mean to imply there is nothing to be gained from analyzing history.
There's every reason to evaluate former presidents. Choose the ones that did the best job and then encourage the current occupant to learn something from them. Consistently, there is one modern president who is given higher marks than all the others (hint: he didn't star in any movies with a monkey). I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there's something for the current president to learn from that success.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, that most likely depends on what you consider useful or insightful. If you're looking for conspiracy theories or state secrets, well, that's not actually what Presidential Archives contain or were meant to contain. It's not censorship, it's the collection policy; the Presidential Archives aren't comprehensive collections of state documents, but of documents associated with the president, which includes a subset of state documents in so far as the President's life coincides with his work.
I think some stuff is still classified, although that's dwindling as various items reach their years-of-disclosure. Virtually none of it would have any relevance to whatever your pet theory is, even if your pet theory happened to be correct, because, frankly, anything too secret for eventual release (i.e. the kind of illegal shenanigans that most conspiracy theories postulate) wouldn't have an official documentation trail to begin with.
Other than that, they're mostly accountable to NARA - the National Archives and Records Administration, who are mostly concerned that archival standards are being followed - they're more interested in preserving the collection than in doing any kind of censorship.
And, frankly, the kind of censorship you suggest isn't really feasible in the case of the JFK collection, anyway. By far the bulk of that specific collection is un-catalogued - I think they have something like 30,000 feet of untouched records and objects, and they're by and large a closed collection (except for copies of J.F.K.'s books, which they serve as a repository for, and a few other open collections, like the Ernest Hemingway collection). It would take immense manpower to even start sorting through that collection, much less do some sort of "SCRUB THE SECRETS" action, especially considering that the search would have to be carried out by people with the clearance to read the secrets, who had the know-how to search uncatalogued archival records.
Is there something out of whack? Because, if they're making high quality (say, 20% resolution from the archival tiffs) photos available, 100mb seems perfectly reasonable to me. If it includes overhead (successive scaling images, for example), it becomes downright conservative.
The previous guy's tone was out of line, but he's more or less right, in that 100mb images (and significantly larger videos, and potentially equivalent or larger audio) is probably more than reasonable for the display-quality assets for a federally funded digital library. Hell, the BPL, whose digitization program is funded off a fairly small, non-repeating grant, routinely keeps 2-4gig archival images around; they scan at around 16gigs for maps with fine detail.
You gonna pony up the scratch for the OCR and indexing work that would take? I mean, if you've got a spare couple million or twelve, it'd be pretty awesome - us liberry folks'll get right on it.
Seriously, though - that would be incredibly awesome, but libraries don't get the kind of funding or have the kind of manpower it would take to do those things with the level of accuracy that would be required. And these collections are HUGE... again, I think JFK has something like 30,000 feet of archival records that haven't even been cataloged yet.
I think it's actually through a UMass-funded project that they're getting this stuff up to begin with; the library's internal admin was running everything off of an Access database as recently as last year.
Well, then they probably want the killer's archives, not JFK's. I mean, it's not like he had paperwork on his own assassination.
"the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was on hand at the opening of the archive."
Creepy.