Explore the new Digital Archives at the Kennedy Library

President Kennedy speaking at Rice University on September 12, 1962. In this speech he stated, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." (Kennedy Library)

It’s always exciting to uncover a new piece of history, and even more exciting to discover a whole new treasure trove of thousands of pieces of history. Today the John F. Kennedy Library is launching a new Digital Archives that contains over 200,000 digitized documents; 300 reels of audiotape containing over 1,200 individual recordings of telephone conversations, speeches, and meetings; 300 museum artifacts; 72 reels of moving images; and 1,500 photos.

You can peruse the drafts of every speech delivered by the President, thousands of official White House photographs, audio of all of President Kennedy’s speeches, and video of press conferences during his years in office. And tags and categories help you find related records among all types of media.

For example, I browsed photographs of President Kennedy to find an illustration for this post, and the above picture caught my eye. After calling up the full record, I selected “Related Records” and was led to links to audio and video recordings of the September 12, 1962, speech at Rice University and to marked drafts and the reading copy of the speech.

Further clicks on the subject categories takes you to even more—you can read the memos between President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson about the space race with the Soviet Union, listen to JFK’s secretly taped conversations with the head of NASA, and watch President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, speech to Congress in which he pledged to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Explore the new Digital Archives for yourself, and see what you can discover.

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