I published a couple of articles in recent months about the John F. Kennedy Library's plans to become the nation's first online presidential archive. See http://goo.gl/tO0Uk and http://goo.gl/efPsu for those earlier articles. Now the plans have become a reality. More than 200,000 printed pages, 1,200 recordings and 300 museum artifacts, as well as reels of film and hundreds of photographs, have been digitized and are available online now.
Kennedy himself broached the idea of making his records available to the masses in 1961. At a news conference, a reporter asked if he would consider putting his papers in Washington, rather than his hometown, to make them more accessible to scholars.
"Through scientific means of reproduction ... and this will certainly be increased as time goes on, we will find it possible to reproduce the key documents so that they will be commonly available," the president responded.
You can read more at http://goo.gl/PtxNE
Will ALL libraries and archives eventually be built like the new JFK Online Presidential Archive?
