National Archives and Records Administration

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Reference System

Browser Information

To view records in the Reference system, your browser must support tables and multiple buttons. The latest versions of Netscape and Mosaic, and the AOL and Compuserve browsers, for example, will display the columns correctly. A list of browsers known to work with the database is available.

The Reference System

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Reference System is an electronic index to the collection of assassination-related material in the National Archives. Agencies that hold assassination records are required to record information about these records on Record Identification Forms (RIF) for input into a master database. A copy of the RIF is also attached to each document.

Many documents in the database are still under review by certain agencies or have been postponed from disclosure. This information is noted in the RESTRICTIONS field or the CURRENT STATUS field of the RIF. Updates to the system are made as agencies complete their reviews and transfer newly opened records to NARA. The database was last updated on November 7, 1995, and currently contains 170,873 records.

Not all the material found in the collection is indexed in the database. Material that was open for research on October 26, 1992, the day the JFK Act was signed, and was in the custody of the National Archives, did not have to be entered into the database. Most notably, most of the materials gathered by the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (commonly called the Warren Commission) have not been separately indexed.

NOTICE

USERS SHOULD BE AWARE, this database is a compilation of entries input by the originating agencies. Although the National Archives and Records Administration provided guidelines for data entry, the master database is inconsistent in the terms used to describe records. Please keep this in mind when planning your database searches.

Contact Information

Questions concerning information in the database should be made to the JFK Access Staff at the National Archives.
Written inquiries:
JFK Access Staff, Room 6350
National Archives at College Park
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, MD 20740-6001
Telephone: (301) 713-6620
FAX: (301) 713-7480.

E-MAIL: Inquiries may also be addressed to NARA's general e-mail reference address, inquire@nara.gov. Inquiries received by general e-mail will be answered by postal mail and not by e-mail. All e-mail inquiries should include a return address. These inquiries must be handled in this manner due to the backlog of JFK inquiries.

Comments

World-Wide Web access to the JFK Reference Database is a pilot project of NARA. We welcome your comments to webmaster@nara.gov on this project.

Return to John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection home page.

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Last updated: 23 May 1996