JFK Database Explorer Updated on Mary Ferrell Foundation Site

[Larry Hancock]

The following is from Rex Bradford and hopefully will be helpful to all of you who do a lot of searching, just passing it on here for your attention:

The JFK Database Explorer has been updated to allow filtering by transparency plan. The 5 transparency plans issued earlier this year catalog which records remain withheld in part. The majority of those appear in NARA's JFK database, and their metadata can now be filtered and viewed. For more on the transparency plans, see State of the JFK Releases 2023.

Rex also provided the following help notes:

Some notes:

 

1. On the JFK Database Explorer page (https://www.maryferrell.org/php/jfkdb.php) there is a new link entitled "View records in transparency plans".  It auto-sets filters which you can also just set manually.  This url is where that link takes you with filters set to any plan: https://www.maryferrell.org/php/jfkdb.php?field=all&filters=tplans:any%20plan

 

2. The filter box has a new dropdown that lets you filter by "any" transparency plan, or by one of the 5 (cia, fbi, nara, state, dod).

 

3. You can filter by multiple fields as always, so you can for instance pick cia transparency plan and then limit record prefix to 157, to see just church committee records in the cia transparency plan.

 

Some caveats:

 

4. The explorer is incomplete. The jfk database explorer is based on the spreadsheets, and thus has no entries for NSA, Army/IRR, or most JFK Library records.  There are another handful of records from other agencies not in the spreadsheet and thus not in the jfkdb explorer.  So this tool is not a complete listing of transparency plan records.

 

5. Some released records still appear in the transparency plans and thus in the explorer. Hundreds of records DO appear in the transparency plans but are nonetheless already open in full, presumably due to full release in Dec 2022 and in 2023.

 

For more info on the transparency plans (including links to them on nara website in sidebar), see this page:

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/State_of_JFK_Releases_2023.html

 

Rex

 

[Steve Thomas]

13 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

The following is from Rex Bradford and hopefully will be helpful to all of you who do a lot of searching, just passing it on here for your attention:

The JFK Database Explorer has been updated to allow filtering by transparency plan.

Larry,

Would you express my thanks to Rex and the others for all their hard work?

The Mary Ferrell site truly is a national treasure.

Steve Thomas

[Larry Hancock]

Will do Steve....and I think we can safely say that the Warren Commission leadership never anticipated something of its nature coming to pass...after all, "nobody reads"...grin.

[David Boylan]

Steve/Larry,

Rex has indeed done an awesome job on this. Kudos to Rex!

[Miles Massicotte]

For someone new to this like myself, I am on MFF nearly every day. I can't imagine how time consuming it would have been to labor through all the document releases over the years without it. I feel spoiled :) MFF is a godsend; thank you to those who make it possible.