Library Director Tom Putnam said they started with all of Kennedy’s Oval Office files—everything that went across his desk—along with his personal papers, official White House photos, audio of all his public remarks, video of his famous speeches, and home movies.
Archivists knew the most requested items in their research room in Boston and used them as a guide.
Private partners—including AT&T, EMC Corp., Raytheon Co., and Iron Mountain Corp.—contributed $6.5 million in equipment and technical services to digitize thousands of records. Iron Mountain will store backup copies of all the digital files about 200 feet below ground level at its facility in western Pennsylvania.
Original files will remain accessible at the Kennedy Library, Putnam said. The digital records, though, will help preserve the originals because they will be handled less frequently, he said.
The library will continue digitizing about 100,000 pages a year, along with thousands of photos and recordings. At that rate, it would still take more than 100 years to digitize all records from the Kennedy administration.
For students across the country, the online archive will mean access to primary-source documents for school research. They could examine Kennedy’s correspondence with Martin Luther King Jr. from the time they first met to the time King was jailed in Birmingham, Ala., for example.
Drafts of Kennedy’s speeches show how he was writing and editing along with speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, giving people a sense of the president’s power as a writer, Putnam said.
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