AARC Public Library Guide

The AARC Public Library is a vast resource of scanned documents with sophisticated tools to help you access it. This Guide provides information on the Public Library's contents and how to find and use them:

I. Public Library Digital Holdings

II. Browsing with the Table of Contents

III. Viewing Documents with the Adobe Reader

IV. Troubleshooting Problems

I. Public Library Digital Holdings

This web site contains reports, transcripts, and other documents relating to political assassinations, particularly the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. These materials include reports from the various government investigations into the crime, as well as source materials such as transcripts from those investigations. The collection also contains relevant material from federal agencies such as the FBI and CIA.

Reports, transcripts, and other documents are constantly being added to the AARC Public Library. The list in the greenpanel to the right describes the current contents in general terms. The public library's table of contents serves as the definitive listing of individual documents.

II. Browsing with the Table of Contents

Main Table of Contents. The table of contents tab near the top of the window takes you to the main level of the AARC Public Library contents. This page divides the collection by government agency—these agencies include investigative bodies like the Warren Commission, HSCA, FBI, CIA, and several others.

Navigating the Hierarchy. Clicking on an agency name takes you to another table of contents page, "one level down" the hierarchy. For instance, the Warren Commission's sub-contents page lists the Warren Report, the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits, and Executive Session transcripts. Click on a sub-contents line to go down one more level in the hierarchy.

Viewing Pages or Documents. Within only a few clicks, you will reach a table of contents page which features individual documents or the sections of a report. Most entries feature two ways of viewing the document or report section.

The links on the left quickly take you to pages featuring a single scanned page image, along with controls to advance to next or previous or nearby pages.
The icons to the right open up a (multi-page) Portable Document Format (PDF) document. The PDF viewer has magnification and other controls which make it superior, but PDF files can be large and slow to download. Pay attention to the size of the file noted by the icon, and avoid large files if your internet connection makes for too much waiting.

Retracing your Steps. From each scanned image page or table of contents page, you can retrace your steps back to where you came from. Use the "Return to" links to back up and browse in another direction. They look like this:

III. Viewing Documents with the Adobe Reader

Along with a set of individual scanned page images, each document is also available in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Beware that these PDF files, consisting of multiple pages at high resolution, can be large. Note the file size accompanying the PDF link—many PDF files are over a megabyte in size, and each megabyte takes roughly 4 to 5 minutes to download over a 56K modem connection. The good news is that the first pages of a document may be viewed while downloading continues.

When PDF files are viewed, the Adobe Reader program displays the file inside the browser window, along with its own toolbar of viewing controls. Depending on browser configuration, the Reader might instead be launched as a separate program with its own window. See the Troubleshooting page for information on correcting this.

Basic information on operating the viewing controls in the Adobe Reader's toolbar is available on the About Adobe Reader page.