June Field Trip: Inside the JFK Library and Museum

Fitzgerald Family^[1]

On Sunday, June 1, PHSNE’s annual field trip will take the society to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Members will have the chance to go behind the scenes with the library’s chief archivist (and PHSNE board member) Allan Goodrich.

Allan will guide a tour of the archives and its increasingly digital conservation facilities, and discuss some of the Library’s lesser-known holdings.

“I’ll talk about how we’re coping in a digital world while staying in analog,” Allan said in describing the program. His staff has been scanning the Kennedy White House archive of presentation photographs — and discovering differences between 45-year-old file prints and contemporary scans. And he’ll talk about some new finds: “A couple of months ago we printed up two or three rolls of negatives JFK’s brother Joe shot in Spain in 1939.”

The Library also holds the largest extant collection of the work done by Boston photographer Josiah Hawes after the end of the Southworth & Hawes partnership.

The arrangements for this year’s field trip will be informal. Travel to the Library is on your own. The cafeteria will be open for lunch, and the program will begin at 1:30. PHSNE members should check in at the information desk at the front door for admission to the archives. Directions to the Library and more information are available on its Web site, www.jfklibrary.org.

-From snap shots, June 2008.