From Ike to Camelot

After my trip to Abilene in June, Boston and the JFK Library was next on my list. All in all the JFK Library was one of the easiest-to-use archives I been to, and with a location on Columbia Point, overlooking the Bay, it was certainly one of the prettiest. (Since my visit coincided with Ted Kennedy's death, it was also quite a humbling time to be there...I'm not going to detail about my experiences navigating the archives around the wake, but I will say that I was interesting to be a part of everything that was going on.)

I'd like to say that the JFK Library is pretty far from downtown, and it is, but after having to drive 2 1/2 hours from Kansas City to get to the Eisenhower Library, the 50 minute commute from Cambridge wasn't bad at all. Logistically, from the JFK/UMass stop on the T Red Line, you hop on Bus #2 (free), which takes you on a nice tour of Columbia Point, ending in front of the Library. The building itself overlooks the Bay with stories-high glass windows, very modernist / minimalist...the view from the reading room is spectacular. The archives themselves are not marked, so to get to them you have to walk through the gift shop to the lone security guard, who takes your name, and escorts you to an elevator, which then takes you to the reading room. Once you know where you are going it is fairly easy, but at first it is quite confusing.

In terms of the archives themselves, the staff is incredibly knowledgeable, and really laid-back - after the brief orientation, they basically leave you alone, though they are always ready to answer any research related questions. The reading room is also one of the more high-tech I've seen, with wireless internet access, and digital locks for their lockers. There are also bathrooms and a water fountain inside the reading room (albeit away from the records,) and I cannot tell you how clutch it is to have those two things there, rather than having to leave the research space, as in most other archives I've been to.

There are a few downsides to the library - for one, not all of the finding aides are digitized and online. They have paper copies of everything in the reading room itself, but I find it much easier to be able to keyword search through the aides. More importantly though, parts of certain collections (or entire other collections,) such as the RFK Attorney General papers, are still closed, for one reason or another. While I understand that there are donor restrictions and other such issues, it is frustrating to know that there are potentially useful materials sitting in the library that I just cannot access.

I did find some really useful documents, and hopefully in a future post I'll go through some of them...For now, I am headed back to DC!