More than 11,000 of Dallas
John Slate, the city’s archivist, is a noted expert on the
assassination of John Kennedy — or haven’t you seen his star turn as the conspiracy theorist wandering the old
Austin Half Price Books stacks in Richard Linklater’s Slacker? He’s
the real deal in real life too, having been involved in the digitization of the
Dallas Municipal Archives’ collection of documents and photos related to the
killing of the president — a process that began way back in 1992, when Wang
Laboratories created “a virtual collection” of some 11,000 photos, police
reports, affidavits, letters and witness statements.”
“It was the first project of its kind, a pioneering
process,” says Slate this morning. “It made national news.”
Those docs remain visible on the city’s website as theJohn F. Kennedy/Dallas
Police Department Collection. But in November 2009 the
404 photos in the collection migrated to the University of North Texas’s Portal
to History; Slate told me a few months later, in conjunction with the online release of the city’s Bonnie and
Clyde collection, that the other JFK-related docs would join them at some
point.
This morning, on the heels of Scott Parks’s piece about Mayor Mike Rawlings’s commemoration
committee, Slate reveals the due date: November of next year, but of
course.
The UNT collection will
mirror the city’s, Slate says, “but it will be a serious upgrade.” As
in: “Everyy document will be in color, there will be much higher resolution,
and it will be fully text-searchable, which probably wasn’t available in 1992.
It’s going to be exactly like the 1992 edition — but much better.”
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