Harold Weisberg Archive Collection

[Magda Hassan]

http://jfk.hood.edu/

207 Gigabytes of information
240,000 files online

The Collection

Through the generosity of Harold Weisberg (1913-2002), Hood College has obtained the world's largest accessible private collection of government documents and public records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Using he Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIAPA), Weisberg acquired from the government hundreds of thousands of relevant documents.
The entire archive is available in its physical form at the Beneficial-Hodson Library.
A digitization project that started in 1994(?), has generated as of today, more than 85% of the archive in electronic form. The digitization project continues and the digitized portions of the archive are now available to browse and search on-line.
Holdings

• 250,000+ pages of documents, largely Warren Commission, FBI, Secret Service, Justice Department, and CIA records.
  
• 85,000+ pages of FBI documents on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and some material relating to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
  
• Records of at least a dozen major FOIAPA lawsuits against the government.
  
• Voluminous and valuable subject index file with Weisberg's collection of contemporary magazine and newspaper clippings, background research, and correspondence with other researchers and writers.
  

Find out more about the archive here.

[John Kelin]

This is truly a remarkable asset. I visited this archive in 2003 and was greatly assisted by Clay Ogilvie, who maintains the Weisberg archive, and by Jan Samet O'Leary, who i think of as the head librarian but whose actual title is something else.

When I visited Clay was already digitizing Weisberg's holdings. It's an enormous amount of material.

The papers of Ray Marcus and Sylvia Meagher are also at Hood.

[Charles Drago]

And Mary Ferrell's collection is WHERE, exactly?

Rotting in containers on a venture capitalist's estate?

Sanitized and locked away?

"Trust me" assurances to the contrary notwithstanding?

The holdings of Weisberg, Meagher, Marcus, Jones, White, Evica, and Ferrell are invaluable and irreplaceable components of what I've termed the People's National Archive. That they are not all publicly viewable in secure locations is indefensible.

Electronic access alone is no access at all.

[John Kelin]

I absolutely agree, Charles. When I was looking for it, I never got any satisfactory information on the whereabouts of Mary Ferrell's stuff.

Right now, the papers of the early critics are scattered -- on a venture capitalist's estate, at Hood, at Baylor, and in a handful of private collections I'm aware of. I have a few irreplaceable things myself. I have this vision -- a total flight of fancy, a pipe dream -- of it all being centralized. Saving it from the ravages of time and improper care are of greater importance.

[Charles Drago]

John,

Somewhere on this Forum you'll find my story of how Mary, over dinner introduced George Michael Evica and me to Oliver Curme, the aforementioned v.c. (venture capitalist, not Viet Cong -- ahh, irony) who ultimately would buy and spirit away her archive.

It made no sense from day one.

If you can't find it here, look for my essay on the subject at CTKA's fine website.

By the way, if I hadn't outed Curme, he would yet be known only as the "private party" who funded the MFF.

Charlie

[John Kelin]

I'm familiar with your essay on the subject. In fact it's on my hard disk, due to my lengthy stint as "webmaster" of the CTKA site.

Speaking of ironic initials, most early critics used a lot of shorthand, as we all do to this day. Sylvia Meagher cringed at writing "SS" for Secret Service. M.S. Arnoni, for one, was a death camp survivor.