Category: Archival Practice

Methods and procedures of archival work

Introducing the Updated Finding Aid (Guide) to the Ernest Hemingway Papers

  by Stacey Chandler, Reference Archivist, and Christina Lehman Fitzpatrick, Processing Archivist The Kennedy Library recently released an updated finding aid (guide) to the Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers to improve organization and to enable better access to the collection. We are excited to share the results of this work: nine separate series (that function like…

Meghan Testerman, Volunteer Extraordinaire

  by Laurie Austin, Audiovisual Reference Archivist In conjunction with Public Service Recognition Week, the Archivist of the United States (or “AOTUS,” as he’s known throughout the National Archives) presented awards to employees and volunteers across the National Archives for exceptional work they achieved over the past year. [Check out the AOTUS’s blog here.] We…

An Experiment in Processing and Digitizing at the Same Time: The Personal Papers of Margaret Ronayne Hahn

  by Stephanie Mokszychi, Graduate Student Intern (Simmons College GSLIS) At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, collections are frequently processed years before digital images and related metadata are available online. Typically, multiple archivists handle materials as they move through the processing, cataloging, and digitization steps. In a trial experiment, I was responsible for all…

“Archiving Your Peace Corps History”: A Presentation at the 2013 Peace Corps Connect Conference

  by Christina Lehman Fitzpatrick, Processing Archivist I was pleased to participate in the Peace Corps Connect conference held in Boston on June 28-29. This event was the second annual gathering of the National Peace Corps Association. Because President Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961, the Kennedy Library has several archival collections pertaining to…

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Five Hemingway Scrapbooks Digitized and Available Online for the First Time

  by Jessica Green and Tiffany Link, Graduate Student Interns (Simmons College and Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Grace Hall Hemingway created and annotated five scrapbooks to document her son Ernest’s first eighteen years of life, long before he became a Nobel Prize-winning author. These unique scrapbooks include countless photographs of the Hemingway family and…

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

  by Kelly Francis, Assistant Digital Archivist for Textual Collections The economy. Unemployment. Religion. Civil rights. Health care. These were the principal issues of the 2012 presidential election. Surprisingly, they were also the major issues of the 1960 election. Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Presidential Campaign Files were cataloged concurrently with the 2012 presidential campaign.…

New Release of the President’s Intelligence Check Lists (aka, PICLs)

  by Maura Porter, Declassification Archivist The President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, is a highly classified intelligence briefing produced each morning for the President of the United States. The written briefing informs the President and other senior policymakers about intelligence developments worldwide and provides analysis of those events. Although now produced by the Director of…

Digitization at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library: The James W. Wine Personal Papers

  by Timothy Bowen, Graduate Student Intern (Simmons College GSLIS) As a soon-to-be graduate of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science with a focus in Archives, I was recently required to complete a 130-hour internship meant to strengthen the skills I learned throughout the program. When Digital Archivist Erica Boudreau approached…

Demystifying Declassification

  by our Declassification Unit colleagues One of the most common questions that we hear from researchers is, “When will this document be declassified?” (sometimes expressed more plaintively as, “Why isn’t this document declassified yet?”). Even for seasoned researchers, security classification can seem mysterious and opaque and hint of governmental cover-up or paranoia. To dispel…