The History Librarian

There's an AP story today (via Yahoo! News) reporting that the John F. Kennedy Library will be digitizing its entire collection of JFK materials:

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is launching a massive project to post 48 million pages of documents, 400,000 photos and 1,200 hours of video on the Internet. The late president's papers will be digitized first, and could be available on the Internet in 18 months, said Allan B. Goodrich, the library's chief archivist.

The Library itself has a press release (with a very grand title): Kennedy Presidential Library Announces Ground Breaking Initiative to Permanently Preserve the Archives of JFK. This is a large collection and it will take at least a decade (they predict) to complete. Here's the first paragraph of the press release:

Twenty-nine years after participating in the formal groundbreaking of the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Columbia Point, Senator Edward M. Kennedy today announced a major and unprecedented effort by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to build a new library – a digital one consisting of the entire collection of papers, documents, photographs and audio recordings of President John F. Kennedy, eventually making them accessible to citizens throughout the world via the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s website.

The JFK Library is heavily used, so I imagine this digital library will be a huge success.