Preserving Profiles in Courage

The digital preservation effort at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum keeps rolling on, one scanned document at a time.

All of President Kennedy's office files (POFs) have been scanned into the archive, and the digital curators at the museum are now focusing on digitally preserving President Kennedy's personal papers.

I have had the good fortune to personally see some of these documents, and for me the most interesting documents are those that contain the President's handwritten notes. In a previous post I wrote about his 1962 speech regarding the US Space Program, and how JFK scribbled notes on the first draft to highlight emphasis and relevance to the audience at Rice University.

Attached below is another example of a heavily edited document from President Kennedy's personal papers. This particular document is a draft of the book Profiles in Courage. The document, along with the handwritten notes, was probably typed and edited around 1953-54 (the book was published in 1955).

NOTE: The image above is PNG format; the curators at the JFK Library use TIFF. I converted to PNG because it's 30x smaller. The curators use TIFF format because they want the highest quality scan; every pencil scratch must be legible.

This is cool stuff. It highlights the importance of digital preservation efforts. As a software engineer working for a company (EMC) that builds information storage systems and workflow management software, it's also a great opportunity to try and build complete solutions that more fully address the needs of digital curators.

Steve

http://stevetodd.typepad.com

Twitter: @SteveTodd

EMC Intrapreneur

Comments

[David Klein]

Very cool!

[Christine]

Yeah, incredibly cool!