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."

But

[TheL0ser]

But does it show who really shot him?

Re:But

[geekoid]

The Comedian.

Re:

[Locke2005]

Everbody knows the Phone Company shot JFK!

Re:

[petermgreen]

he travelled back in time shot himself, I saw it on the BBC ;)

Where is the quick-link

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

to all of the Marilyn Monroe film and photos?

Re:

[jaymzter]

I'd be more interested in documents regarding Kennedy's ineptitude regarding the Bay of Pigs, how he dragged us deeper into the Vietnam War, his complicity in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, and the personal monument the Russians built for him, the Berlin Wall. When it comes to Presidents being in over their heads, Kennedy made Bush and Obama look like true statesmen.

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

I'd be more interested in documents regarding Kennedy's ineptitude regarding the Bay of Pigs, how he dragged us deeper into the Vietnam War, his complicity in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, and the personal monument the Russians built for him, the Berlin Wall. When it comes to Presidents being in over their heads, Kennedy made Bush and Obama look like true statesmen.

George Bush is not fit to light John F. Kennedy's cigar. Not as a man and not as a president.

Re:

[operagost]

Thanks for all the evidence to back your assertion. You could have at least specified 41 or 43. Anyway, at least JFK lowered the outrageous income taxes.

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

You could have at least specified 41 or 43.

U pick 'em.

Re:Who was the best president?

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

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

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

why argue over which former president is better than another?

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

This just in

[GameboyRMH]

Julian Assange called in for questioning regarding a MASSIVE US government data leak!

Re:

[Quiet_Desperation]

You fool! You may have initiated a conspiracy theory singularity! Run! just... run!

Finally got on

[thetoadwarrior]

All day during work it seemed to be down. I can get in now and it'll be interesting to sift through their material.

Rest assured that this collection has been ...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

cleansed of anything really useful or insightful. 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.

Scrub

[handy_vandal]

"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."

Politics of the Undead

[handy_vandal]

Oh yes, Dick Cheney died, all right.

Then his Zombie corpse ran for Vice-President ... and won.

Re:

[geekoid]

You're an alarmist idiot.

Re:Rest assured that this collection has been ...

[oodaloop]

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.

Re:

[Count Fenring]

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

Wow, imagine that

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

that's like 25,000 DVDs of Marilyn Monroe pr0n...

Oops

[Anonymous Coward]

small correction: Carolyn was his DAUGHTER not his wife.

Re:

[madaket]

Caroline was his daughter

Re:Oops

[digitalsolo]

Indeed. JFK Jr. did have a wife named Carolyn, but she died in the plane crash that killed him. Caroline Kennedy, who attended, was JFK's daugher (and, obviously, JFK Jr. sister, not wife).

Re:

[Count Fenring]

Really? Because that's not remotely bad for archival tiffs. I believe the BPL's digitization program (one of the more under-funded such in many respects) routinely produces multi-GIG files; I think 16gb for some of their maps.

His wife was on-hand?

[Sandor at the Zoo]

said Carolyn Kennedy, the wife of the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was on hand at the opening of the archive.

Didn't she die along with him, in the plane crash? The wiki [wikipedia.org] says so.

Jeepers, what did /. do to this text field to make it so hard to paste a link?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. thats JFK jr's SISTER not wife unless the zombie apocolypse has started..

As opposed to

[Locke2005]

The G.W. Bush Presidentially library, which I believe contains no less than six coloring books now...

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

I don't think there will ever come a time when it's not topical to point out that the first president of the 21st century was a nincompoop.

Re:

[kenrblan]

I don't think the coloring books have been made available online.

Re:

[Locke2005]

They won't be, at least until GW finishes coloring them.

And by the way, GW could have faded silently into obscurity, but he just _had_ to publish a book (Decision Points) attempting to justify the poor decisions his administration made... which makes him a fair target for derision all over again.

Re:

[Jim_Maryland]

Yes I realize you are trying to be funny but you might be interested in reading an article on the GWB archive.

Electronic Info Dominates George W. Bush's Archive [go.com]

On Jan. 20, 2014 — five years to the date after Bush left office — citizens will be able to request access to his administration's archives through the Freedom of Information Act.

What would be nice is to see all this information available through searching online, but as I understand it, request will need to go through the National Ar

Re:

[operagost]

Shall we color them presidentially? Ironic mistakes are ironic.

Re:

[treeves]

That might have been an intentionally mistake, for humorous effect.

And the smallest presidential library ....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

would belong to this guy [wikipedia.org].

These are the same clowns...

[jameskojiro]

These are the same clowns that blocked the JFK Documentary film that the History Channel produced from airing.

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

These are the same clowns that blocked the JFK Documentary film that the History Channel produced from airing.

Or are they the same clowns that blocked the Ronald Reagan film that CBS produced from airing?

Re:

[Count Fenring]

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 f

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

Even making those generous assumptions, that's still an *average* of around 300MB per image,

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.

Carolyn Kennedy?

[nebaz]

Carolyn Kennedy died with JFK Jr. during the plane crash. Perhaps Caroline Kennedy, his sister was on hand at the opening of the archive?

Re:

[bberens]

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.

Re:

[Count Fenring]

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

117TB? Really?

[wyr_taliesin]

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?

Re:

[Count Fenring]

If they're doing serious archival tiffs to least significant detail, the files might be much, much bigger than that. The BPL's original scans come in at multiple GIGABYTES per scan; they actually have to drop the final files down significantly from their original size, in order to fit into their allotted space.

Re:

[yodleboy]

have you been to the library of congress site? i've pulled up several images in their collections that are over 10MB

Re:

[Count Fenring]

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.

subject

[Legion303]

"the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., who was on hand at the opening of the archive."

Creepy.