ARTICLE/WEB SITE: JFK Library "Touring Camelot, Without Having to Leave Home"

[Ryan Goble]

Great article from the times about the new Kennedy library archives online...

Touring Camelot, Without Having to Leave Home
By KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: January 13, 2011

BOSTON — The John F. Kennedy Library here has long offered visitors the opportunity to see the bar tab from Robert F. Kennedy’s bachelor party and to decipher John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office doodles. Now, those artifacts and a trove of others will be on display to anyone in the world. 

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Nearly 50 years after Kennedy pledged to make presidential documents “commonly available” through “scientific means of reproduction, microfilms and all the rest,” nearly 250,000 documents and 200 hours of audio and video from the library’s archives are to be made available online Thursday, free of charge. It is the first release in a $10 million effort to digitize his presidency.

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The digital archives are searchable. Entering “inaugural address,” for example, brings up a draft by Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter, and video of the event.

Telephone calls include one between Kennedy and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower discussing the Cuban missile crisis.

 

Full article can be read here.