Baylor library’s JFK archive grows into one of nation’s premier collections

By David Tarrant

Thousands will descend on Dealey Plaza in November for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But one of the most intriguing sites related to the tragedy is 95 miles south, tucked away at Baylor University in Waco.

The W.R. Poage Legislative Library contains a JFK assassination archive that is quietly growing into one of the nation’s premier collections.

In recent years, more than a dozen researchers, authors and experts on the assassination have donated work accumulated over their lifetimes. The files include hundreds of thousands of public documents, photos, recordings, reel-to-reel films and other materials about the tragedy and subsequent investigation — or, depending on your point of view, government cover-up....

JFK Resource Consortium

In November, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza launched the JFK Resource Consortium, a Web portal with links to various JFK-related collections and archives around Texas. Along with Baylor University’s Poage Library, the site includes links to two dozen institutions, including many universities in North Texas.

Each institution has something different to offer researchers pursuing an angle on the Kennedy assassination, said Krishna Shenoy, librarian of The Reading Room at the Sixth Floor Museum.

The DeGolyer Library at SMU includes the papers of civic leader Stanley Marcus and Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of the assassination. “If you want to know what the city was like at the time, you’d want to go there,” Shenoy said.

The Sixth Floor Museum is also an archival and research institution, Shenoy said. “We have over 40,000 items in the museum collection, including over 1,000 oral histories, and 5,500 in the library collection.” To learn more, visit http://www.jfk.org/go/reading-room/consortium.