Tomorrow, will be the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inauguration. He served as the 35th president of the United States for 1,036 days. To honor the occasion and as part of the efforts to provide broader access to the historical records which hold the Kennedy legacy, a new digital archive has been created at .
The digital archive has been four years in the making. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a division of the US National Archives and Records Administration, and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the non-profit that lends the library financial and staffing support, began this massive effort in 2006. To date, more than an estimated $10 million in financial and technology donations have been dedicated to digitize and describe the contents of the archive and take it live.
The digital archive provides the global public with an inside look into the life of President Kennedy and the issues that defined his presidency, including civil rights, nuclear proliferation and space exploration. To start its online archive, The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library chose to digitize its six most important collections. These include the President’s White House office files, his personal papers, outgoing letters, and the photos, videos and audio recorded during his time in the White House. More than 200,000 documents, 300 audiotapes, 1,245 individual recordings of telephone calls, 72 film reels and 1,500 photos from these collections are now available online. The sheer volume of digitized materials is unprecedented for presidential libraries whose collections were not born digitally.
Unfortunately, many documents related to the Kennedy Administration are still in non-digital formats. The Kennedy Presidential Library’s research facilities hold more than 8.4 million pages of the personal, congressional and presidential papers of JFK and more than 40 million pages of over 300 other individuals who were associated with the Kennedy Administration or mid-20th Century American history. In addition, the archives hold more than 400,000 still photographs; 9,000 hours of audio recordings; 7.5 million feet of motion picture film; and 1,200 hours of video recordings. Digitization efforts are ongoing and additional material will continue to be added to the archive as it is scanned and described.
