ResearchBuzz

Recently, some old documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were found. And the Dallas Morning News wants your help going through them. There are 54 groups of content on this page, each of which contains a list of contents scanned into PDF format.

There’s a forum devoted to discussion of the documents, but it doesn’t appear to be very busy at the moment. There’s also a place you can contact if you find something in the documents, but you have to be a member of DallasNews.com to use it.

The University of Rochester Libraries has a Web site, “Lincoln and His Circle”, available at http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379#”. At the moment the site is more of an index-with-images of letters that were written to/from Lincoln, but 26 of them have been transcribed and there’s a promise of more transcriptions over time.

You can browse the letters by writer or recipient, or go through them by date. You can also search by keyword. A search for emancipation found five results, with three of them written to, and one written from, Abraham Lincoln. (The other one was written from JL Motley to William Henry Seward.)

When you click on the ID number of the letter — for example, the letter from James Henderson to Abraham Lincoln — you’ll get a set of vital statistics about the letter (to/from, date, location, number of pages, etc.) as well as a set of images of the reader. The ones I looked at I could not read thanks to both handwriting and fading.

Some of the letters DO have transcripts, also with occasional notes about the letters and content.

William F. Buckley died this week. I knew that he hosted Firing Line, but I did not know that Stanford University had a database of Firing Line TV shows. The show ran from 1966 to 1999, and there were just over 1504 episodes of the program.

The database, at http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/programList.php, appears to list something over 1200 episodes (and a couple of related specials.) They’re presented in a table which includes episode number, name, and two columns that show whether the first five minutes are available as streaming media, and whether the whole show is available and in what format (the only available format I saw was VHS.)

If you click on the name of the program you’ll get other information including the list of guests, taping date, duration, a summary of the program, and whether a copy of it is available. If you want to look at the first five minutes of a show (I would say less than ten percent of the shows listed have the first five minutes available as streaming media) you’ll need to have the RealOne video player.

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, which hosts the site at Stanford, is asking for suggestions on what shows to digitize and make available online. You can get more information on the database at http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/index.php .