By Laura Kintz, Digitization Archivist
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is pleased to announce that all photographs, scrapbooks, and albums in the Kennedy Family Collection have been digitized in full and are now accessible online through the Library’s digital archives. This project started in 2017 with the digitization of at-risk nitrate negatives. More recently, thanks to generous support from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and a Save America’s Treasures grant, the collection’s scrapbooks, albums, and photographic prints were digitized. (The vast majority of these items were digitized off-site at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts.)
The Kennedy Family Collection was donated to the Library by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, President Kennedy’s mother. It contains approximately 6,000 items that document the life and times of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families over a span of about 100 years — 1878 through 1980. There are a mix of personal family photos, portraits, and media photos, including photographs kept and/or taken by the family themselves, and photographs sent or given to them. In addition to scrapbooks and albums, other types of bound volumes include diaries, guest logs, and a yearbook. These volumes contain additional photographs, newspaper clippings, and handwritten notations and entries made by Kennedy family members, friends, and associates.
Kennedy Family Collection by the Numbers:
- Approximately 6,000 photographic prints, negatives, transparencies, and other graphic materials (1,700 of which are nitrate negatives).
- Over 8,600 scanned images of graphic materials, including fronts and backs of all photographic prints.
- 52 bound volumes (scrapbooks, photograph albums, diaries, guest logs, and a yearbook).
- Approximately 8,000 scanned pages across all bound volumes.
CATALOGING AND DESCRIBING the COLlection
Digitization archivists at the Library cataloged each bound volume and each photograph. Using research tools including online photograph and newspaper databases, Ancestry.com, and the JFK Library’s own collections, archivists created detailed descriptions of these items in order to maximize findability.
For some photographs, useful information was available in the form of accompanying printed captions from media sources, handwritten inscriptions, and other associated materials that provided context for catalogers.
Other photographs were more difficult to describe than others. The source of a photo and its context were not always clear, so archivists could only describe what they saw.
To catalog scrapbooks, albums, and other bound volumes, archivists reviewed every page of every volume, then summarized their contents in detailed descriptions at the object level.
The collection also contains examples of materials that are not specifically photographs, but are still considered graphic materials, including postcards, artwork, and even a plenary indulgence!
Check out the Kennedy Family Collection finding aid to view additional images and to learn more about the collection and its contents. If you have any questions, please reach out to JFK.AVArchives@nara.gov.