JFKRA Release 6: Different versions

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Robert

[This article was revised on 1/30/2018 to correct several major points.]

As I noted in an earlier post, there are a number of records listed twice in NARA’s spreadsheet of the JFKRA documents which it has posted on line.

These double listings come in two varieties: in one case there are actually two files posted at NARA: one from release ‘A’ and one from release ‘B’, both files presenting the same document, but with various differences between them.

In the second case, the same record is listed twice, but each listing refers to the same file, so there is only one file on line.

Today I return to a look at the cases where there are two different files on line. This situation is actually not new to release 6. Last November I already noted a number of cases where there were two files that provided different versions of the same document.

In those cases, the differences were clear: one version might have a reader information form (RIF sheet), and the other one not. One version might have redactions and the other one dropped them.

In release 6, this situation continues. This link provides a list of different versioned files posted in release 6, followed by a list of the earlier cases in releases 1-5, with a brief description in each case of the differences between the two versions.

In release 6, the differences between the two versions are sometimes very small. An example of this is the files in two versions released under case numbers 45839 and 45840; the only difference between these documents that I can see is the case number.

When there is a significant difference between the two versions, it is often, perversely, that the release 6 versions offer a redacted version of documents previously released in full. The last six files on my list are all like this!

In a few cases, the differences between the two versions are larger. The first two files on my list, 104-10330-10088 and 104-10332-10021, both come in two different versions, presenting somewhat different material. The comments in the NARA spreadsheet do not offer any explanation of where the two versions of these documents came from.

Of course, the JFKRA documents available before the 2017 releases are often highly redundant in the first place.

The same document may be released multiple times because the investigation that acquired a document acquired 3 or 4 copies of it. The entity responsible for overseeing the releases, the ARRB, interpreted the Assassination Record Collection Act of 1992 to require that all of these copies become part of the collection, regardless of whether they were identical or not.

Another way this could happen is that two different investigations into the assassination obtained copies of the same document; these copies are present in the records of both investigations. Again, the ARRB interpreted the ARCA to require that both copies should be part of the collection, listed, of course, as separate records.

On the other hand, I don’t see why this has resulted in NARA posting versions of the same document with and without rif sheets, or with and without various other minor, non-textual changes and redactions.

In addition to the files on my list, there are also a few cases where two files having the same record number are simply different documents. This seems to defeat the purpose of the record numbers, which are supposed to be unique for each document in the collection.

In fact, I think there is a reasonable explanation for these cases, which I’ll discuss in my next post on the JFKRA records.

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JFKRA Confusion at NARA

Posted on January 24, 2018 by Robert

[Revised on 2018/1/26 to fix a goof. I was even more confused than I thought.]

Most of my posts about the JFK records act releases at NARA are on very trivial subjects, but the problems I discuss are, nonetheless, quite confusing (to me). The subject of the post today is confusing++.

There are three entries on the NARA Release 6 spreadsheet that are problematic. The first of these entries is row 4172 on the spreadsheet, identifying a document with record number 124-10223-10189 and filename docid-32570769.pdf

This is a four page list of informants on the NY state CPUSA in the late 1950s. It is an excerpt from a longer document, the full version is at Mary Ferrell. The MF version redacts some of the FBI informant numbers, this excerpt releases them all.

The second problematic entry is row 31532 on the spreadsheet, identifying a document with record number 124-10223-10189 and filename docid-32555585.pdf

Although this is the same record number as on row 4172, it is a different file with totally unrelated content. It is a memo on Rene Jesus Castillejo Cova, sent by the FBI legat in Caracas (don’t ask what it’s about, too confusing). This document is also available at Mary Ferrell in a redacted version.

The third problematic entry is row 31573 on the spreadsheet, which lists a document that has record number 124-10223-10289 and filename docid-32570769.pdf

This is, of course, the same filename as on row 4172, but a different record number. Same filename means it is the same file: the list of CPUSA informants.

The only way I was able to straighten this out was to check on-line at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a great resource which I use constantly.

There are three problems here. The second entry has the wrong record number. Per Mary Ferrell, the Castillejo document is record number 124-10223-10289, not 124-10223-10189. The record number for the third entry on row 31573 is also wrong. It should be 124-10223-10189, not 124-10223-10289.

Yes, the two record numbers were swapped: the entry at 31532 listed the record number for the informant list and the filename for the Castillejo document; the entry at 31573 listed the record number for the Castillejo document and the filename for the informant list.

The third problem: NARA has listed the informant document, file docid-32570769.pdf, twice: once on row 4172 and once on row 31573.

This last point is not actually a mistake, but it is highly confusing. In this case, NARA posted two different versions of file docid-32570769.pdf. How do I know? I downloaded docid-32570769.pdf on October 26, and again today. They are the same document, but different files. The text of the two files is exactly the same, but the earlier version, downloaded on 10-26, has a stamp on the bottom of the first page indicating it was released as part of case #NW 54464 on 10-10-2017; this case# appears on the footers of all pages of the file.

In the version of the file now up at NARA, which I just downloaded, there is no stamp on the first page, and the footer says NW 45785. This is one of the “replaced” files I discussed a couple of posts ago.

So, I caught the errors in the record numbers on my list of errata, but I missed the replacement on my list of replaced files here. Bad on me.

Why is the same document the subject of two different NARA cases? Why did NARA post it twice in two trivially different versions? Why is this trivial stuff so confusing?

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Review of China Nurse, 1932-1939

Posted on January 22, 2018 by Robert

On the front lines

Ewen, Jean. China nurse, 1932-1939. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981.

Jean Ewen was a Canadian nurse who spent 6 years in China, working first with Catholic missionaries, then with the Chinese Communists’ 8th and New 4th armies. This might seem like a drastic change, but there is a back story of course. Her father was Tom Ewen (or McEwen?), a prominent member of the Canadian Communist Party. As Jean tartly remarks, he looked forward to the proletarian revolution, “in which he could play a more interesting role than being a father to his four children.” Ewen herself is emphatically not a communist, and her decision to head off to China as a Catholic missionary is classic youthful revolt against parental authority.

According to Ewen, she arrived in China in mid-1933 (oddly conflicting with the title of the book), and took up nursing posts in increasingly isolated areas of Shantung province, encountering bandits, floods, famine, and all manner of political turmoil, but apparently getting along well with both the missionaries and the desperately poor peasants she nursed.

She returned to Canada in June 1937, just missing the beginning of the China-Japan war. In December, she was recruited by the Canadian Communist Party for a medical mission to the Chinese Communists’ Eighth Route Army in northwestern China. Also on the mission was the famous Dr. Norman Bethune, about whom Ewen has many interesting things to say.

Basically, Ewen found Bethune a “gifted physician,” but a rather awful person, and the conflict between them is very entertaining to read about. After a horrific air raid, in which she is “scared spitless,” Bethune ponderously informs her that “Every man must have two baptisms in his life–once with fire and once with water.” This, Bethune explains, is her baptism of fire, to which Ewen snaps, “You are nothing but a bloody missionary.” Bethune then rains down fire on her a second time: “He yelled and screamed, talking so quickly that I don’t think he knew exactly what he was saying. ‘Don’t you ever say anything like that to me again, you dizzy bitch!'”

Bethune and Ewen soon parted ways, but Ewen stayed for over a year, first in Shensi, then in Anhui, where she worked with the Communist New Fourth Army and Agnes Smedley, among other people. This, according to Ewen, was a terrible snafu, with the Army finally taking over the hospitals and medical services.

Ewen is often a very evocative writer, as in her description of sleeping in one of the loess caves that served as housing in Shensi: “From the bed roll you hear all the chattering of the mice and the scratching of the crawlers who live in the earth. You never know just how alive the earth is until you occupy a cave.” Her description of the brutal Japanese air raids and the chaos that followed are also some of the most vivid I’ve read about the war.

Overall, this book is a great read, but the reader must be careful, especially when Ewen is describing events in which she has not herself participated. Her description of the famous Sian Incident of Dec. 1936 is a mess, and there are many odd departures from fact throughout the book. Oddest of all is her description of leaving Sian in October 1938, on pages 118-120, where she seems to go from Sian to Chengchow, then back to Sian, in order to get to Hankow! The Chinese transcriptions are also totally scrambled, but fortunately few.

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Review of Decadence Mandchoue

Posted on January 16, 2018 by Robert

Indefatigable reiteration

Backhouse, Edmund Trelawny. Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. Ed. Derek Sandhaus. Hong Kong: Earnshaw, 2011.

Make no mistake about it: Decadence Mandchoue is a work of pure fantasy, for the most part a remarkably monotonous fantasy, of sex, sex, sex. I can’t imagine anyone reading through the whole thing unless he has a real taste for Victorian gay pornography; I don’t, so it was skip, skip, skip. The few non-pornographic bits are something else, though; these are like fragments of a late Victorian historical romance, an Anthony Hope imitation with Peking as Ruritania. If that makes it sound appealing, give it a shot, but be aware that this is only a small part of the book.

The author of this really odd book, presented as an autobiographical memoir, was Edmund Backhouse, the subject of a really interesting book, The Hermit of Peking, by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Backhouse was originally known as a somewhat eccentric sinologist who published two books on Qing Dynasty politics in collaboration with British journalist J. O. P. Bland, and who gave the Bodleian Museum one of the best collections of Chinese books in Europe. Trevor-Roper, however, uncovered a lot more interesting information than this, and The Hermit of Peking is much more entertaining (for the most part) than Decadence Mandchoue.

Still, the starting point for Trevor-Roper’s book was in fact just Backhouse’s two volumes of reminiscences: Decadence Mandchoue is the second, the first remains unpublished. Trevor-Roper was asked to authenticate them and was immediately interested by the incredible nature of the stories the books told. After diligent spadework, he dug up some remarkable information about the complex scams and fantasies that Backhouse inflicted on anyone unlucky enough to get involved with him. Naturally anyone who is interested in this book should read Hermit of Peking first, otherwise most of it won’t make any sense, not even the sex.

Oddly, though, Trevor-Roper comes in for some heavy criticism in the introduction from the editor of Decadence Mandchoue, Derek Sandhaus. I find most of this criticism hard to accept.

For instance, Sandhaus complains that Trevor-Roper did not make any attempt to “consult Backhouse’s Chinese and Manchu contemporaries.” He concedes that Trevor-Roper could hardly have gone to Peking in 1976 during the Cultural Revolution, but insists that “he could have spoken with former Peking residents who had left China around the time of the Communist takeover in 1949. These people would have been in a unique position to confirm or refute Backhouse’s claims.”

In fact, Trevor-Roper did consult Peking residents: he talked to Harold Acton, Henri Vetch, Roland de Margerie, Hope Danby, Humphrey Prideaux-Brune, and to William Lewisohn, a true contemporary of Backhouse, 90 years old when Trevor-Roper contacted him. Most of these people actually met Backhouse; some, like Danby, saw him often and must count as friends, others, like Lewisohn, tried to unravel some of Backhouse’s complicated literary scams and showed Trevor-Roper their correspondence with Backhouse.

Sandhaus would apparently discount all these people and insist on Chinese acquaintances, but except for his servants, Backhouse’s Chinese acquaintances are unknown. How was Trevor-Roper to contact them? You need names first, and no one ever got names of real Chinese acquaintances out of Backhouse. When the American Bank Note Company was trying to figure out what happened to their contract for 650 million banknotes, they interviewed the Chinese politicians Backhouse claimed he had made his crooked deal with: Hsu Shih-ch’ang, former President, and Tuan Ch’i-jui, then Prime Minister. Their response: Never heard of him. Signature on the contract? A forgery.

Given Backhouse’s skill at concealing virtually all of his personal life, I think Trevor-Roper did the best that could be done. Of course he did not have the skills to dig into the Chinese side of things, but because of the fake diary that Backhouse produced for his work with Bland, both Western and Chinese scholars looked hard for his Chinese acquaintances (or accomplices). Nothing has turned up and the origin of the fake diary remains a mystery. This silence is puzzling. A number of Western scholars studied and lived in Peking in this period, and show up in various reminiscences, Chinese and Western, but not Backhouse. The best we can get is a claim from a Backhouse acquaintance that a rickshaw puller once told him there was a rumor that Backhouse used to be the lover of the Empress Dowager. How did the puller know the rumor? How does anyone know a rumor? “Some dude told me.”

Behind Sandhaus’s criticism of Trevor-Roper lies an idea: there is, somewhere, somehow, some fragment of truth to Backhouse’s memoir, and in justice to Backhouse we must examine his work sentence by sentence, confirming or refuting until we have found it. Please. Trevor-Roper found plenty of evidence that there were outrageous lies in Backhouse’s memoirs. No doubt it might be an entertaining process to try and find some truth in them as well, but we need not delay any decision on how much to rely on Backhouse without examination. You’d have to be nuts to believe a word he wrote.

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New FLLD list on line

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Robert

My old list of foreign language and literature programs in Taiwan and Hong Kong linked on the right side of this blog ceased to be useful about 15 years ago. I didn’t realize quite how out of date it was until I started to revise it a couple of weeks ago.

In the 15 years since I compiled the list, whole categories of schools have ceased to exist, categories of departments, programs, and specializations. An example: there is no longer even one teacher college (師範學院) in Taiwan. They have either ascended to the ranks of normal universities (師範大學), or been absorbed, amoeba like, into other schools.

Despite these extinctions and transmogrifications, however, Taiwan’s tertiary level foreign language programs are still flourishing in extremely various ways. With the help of my assistant Ignatius Liu, I’ve put together a new page of links listing over 130 departments and programs. The list is still not complete, however, and additions will appear as I find them.

Use the side link for the new version, or click here and give it a try. If you click on a link that doesn’t respond, try again later, even some rather large schools can have poor network connections it seems (hrmph, hrmph). If you get a page not found error, though, let me know. I hope the page format looks more professional than before. There is a real English version as well, the new default view.

Next project: Chinese language and literature departments!

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JFKRA Release 6: The two missing files

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Robert

NARA’s announcement of JFKRA release 6 stated that 3,539 files were posted on NARA’s website. As I noted in an earlier post (here), I was only able to find 3537, leaving two unaccounted for. This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, so I’ve been looking for them for almost a month now.

Although I cannot definitively answer this question, I now have a suggestion about the discrepancy. In reviewing my figuring for my post on NARA’s file replacement (here), I noticed that there are two duplicate listings in release 6. Using the latest NARA spreadsheet of JFKRA releases as a reference, row 2356 lists document #124-10204-10000, posted as docid-32585200.pdf. Row 3424 then lists the same document, 124-10204-10000, posted as the same file, docid-32585200.pdf. This happens again at rows 3849 and 3944, which list document #157-10002-10002, posted as docid-32281842.pdf, twice. Perhaps this is the reason that NARA thought that it posted 3539 files, but actually posted only 3537.

Another possibility is that, in both these cases, NARA actually posted two different files with the same name. The effect of this would of course be that the second file overwrote the first file. This is what happened with the ‘replacement files’ I discussed earlier. In those cases, I was able to see that there were originally two different files because I had downloaded the earlier version of the file before it was overwritten (replaced) by the later version. In the case of 124-10204-10000 and 157-10002-10002, however, the first version of the file would have been overwritten a few minutes or seconds later, when the second version was uploaded on top of it. I doubt that anyone could have been lucky enough to download the first version in such a short time, so the only ones who would have seen these theoretical different versions of the two documents are the folks at NARA.

Going back to an earlier issue, I also noted a while ago that there is an earlier set of 9 files that have the same problem: These are files listed in the spreadsheet for release 1, then again, with the same record number, and the same file name, in the spreadsheet for release 3. I did not discuss these in my post on replacement files because I do not have copies of the first (July) release versions of these files; I downloaded only a part of these files at that time, and therefore missed that opportunity. These release 1 and release 3 duplicate listings have the same possibilities as the duplicate listings in the release 6 spreadsheet: 1) it could just be a typo; 2) there could have been two versions of these files as well, and the earlier version was overwritten by the later version, as happened to the replacement files.

Although I can’t say what the case was for any of these “duplicate listings”, I’ve put up a list of them here, and I’ll try a letter to NARA after I’ve gone through the remaining issues in release 6.

Postscript

I reviewed the zip files I downloaded immediately after release 1 in July, and found 5 of the 9 pdf files that were posted again in release 3 in November. The release 1 version and the release 3 version are in all cases byte for byte identical. This negates any suspicion of NARA ‘replacing’ an earlier version of these July files with a later, different version in November.

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JFKRA Release 6: Replacing files at NARA

Posted on January 9, 2018 by Robert

This post continues a discussion of the sixth release of JFKRA records from NARA. This time I will look at a quirk of release 6 that I call replacement files.

As I noted a while ago (here and here), in releases 1-5 there were a number of records listed twice in NARA’s spreadsheet of documents posted on line.

These came in two varieties. In one set there were actually two files posted at NARA: one from release ‘A’ and one from release ‘B’, both files presenting the same document, but with various differences between them (see the earlier posts for a discussion).

In the second set, the same record was listed twice, but each listing referred to the same file, so there was only one file posted. I had thought this was simply an error on the part of the spreadsheet editor(s), but release 6 now has me wondering.

In fact, release 6 has 45 instances of this type of duplication, as listed in this link.

For each of these instances, I had already downloaded the file prior to the posting of the release 6 files. When release 6 was posted, however, I discovered that these 45 files had changed; and were now different from the files I had downloaded earlier. The earlier versions of these 45 files are no longer available on the NARA site.

How to describe this situation? Let’s just say that NARA replaced the older versions with newer versions. Since I had downloaded the earlier versions, I was able to compare them with the newer versions that replaced them. This post summarizes what I found.

Type 1: markings changed, text unchanged

In some cases, the new version is actually a new scan; in other cases, it seems to be the same scan, but is marked differently. This sort of thing is, well, unfortunate. I am sure that no one intended it would be necessary to engage in the study of what bibliographers call ‘accidentals’ (physical variations in a printed work, as opposed to different wording) when reading the JFKRA releases, but there you are.

One way to denote these different versions is to look at the ‘case #’ of the file. The case # can appear in two or three places. Some files have a stamp with the case number on it (usually preceded by boilerplate text reading something like ‘Released under the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992’ etc.) In other cases there is no stamp, the case # may be added in the header or footer of the file.

In 38 of the 45 files that were replaced, these case #’s either changed, or the earlier version had NO case # and the release 6 version has added a case #, so this is a convenient way to distinguish them. These differences are all indicated in the table linked to above. In one case, the case # was the same, but one file had a stamp and the other didn’t. Other than this kind of ‘accidental’, these files are the same. Why then replace them? Ask NARA.

Type 2: markings unchanged, text changed

For 6 of the remaining 7 files the case # did not change. In these files, however, the text changed, with redactions in the earlier versions removed in the later versions. Since the point of this whole exercise is to release more complete versions of the documents, I don’t think there will be too many complaints about this.

The problem with this method of silently replacing early versions of files with later versions is that some people may worry that NARA could get cold feet, and replace an unredacted version of a document with a redacted version.

I am reasonably sure that NARA has not gotten cold feet, but there is one case where this actually happened: RIF # 124-90035-10121 (docid-32144601.pdf). The current version has a redaction that was not there in the earlier version which I downloaded on November 19.

What did the earlier unredacted version say? Send me 5 dollars US by PayPal and I’ll tell you. (Kidding, just kidding.)

The redacted version reads:

Enclosed herewith for the Bureau are two copies of cover page B, pages 1 and 5 and for PG three copies of pages 1 and 5 and two copies of cover page B. The amendments were made necessary by the fact that on 1/12/60 [three lines blanked out]

The redaction is footnoted “JFK Law 11(a)” which is the exemption for IRS records. However, the earlier version shows that the words deleted were as follows:

PLATO CACHERIS turned over to SA PENNYPACKER additional checks of ESCO which included salary checks of WEINHEIMER and checks to other persons on behalf of WEINHEIMER which are pertinent to the report and Agent’s work papers.

This has nothing to do with information from the IRS, it was information given to SA Pennypacker (the author of both the report and this memo) by Plato Cacheris. I find this citation of JFK 11(a) quite dubious, and I’ll complain about it in a minute.

First, though, what is this obscure item talking about anyway? A sort of summary of the story is here. Edward Weinheimer, who apparently “fixed” union problems for people, was charged with perjury for claiming he wasn’t paid to fix problems for a company called ESCO, when he really was. Plato Cacheris was a DoJ attorney who was working the case.

Why this text was removed, retroactively, is very hard to understand. Citing JFK 11(a) is just not reasonable. Other JFKRA documents on this case were released by NARA here and here. Why weren’t they redacted as well? I don’t understand.

Regardless, however, I await my gold citizen’s badge for exposing this coverup. What? What’s that? What does Weinheimer, or ESCO, or Pennypacker, or Cacheris have to do with the assassination of President Kennedy? What a question! Even a simpleton such as me knows the answer to that! And if you send me 10 dollars US by PayPal, I’ll tell you.

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JFK Records Act Releases: Errata

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Robert

I had hoped to have another post on JFKRA release 6 from NARA, but there are some problems with the release metadata. For one thing, there are some typos in the RIF numbers that have made it hard to figure out what some of the documents released are. I have a tentative list of RIF number errata here. There are also a lot of duplicates in release 6. I do not understand where these are coming from. Perhaps I should write to NARA. Anyway, I haven’t given up yet; more dull posts are coming.

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Wisconsin by air

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Robert

A video from number one son Nick, who got his drone pilot license earlier this year. Credit for his hand and eye coordination, and sense of picture composition, goes to his mom, not me.

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JFK Records Act Releases: 12-15 update

Posted on December 16, 2017 by Robert

The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) has released a sixth set of records under the JFK Records Act. The release, which took place on December 15, was announced here. According to the announcement,

At this point, with the exception of 86 record identification numbers where additional research is required by the National Archives and the other agencies, all documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act have been released either in full or in part

This may therefore be the end of NARA posting JFKRA records. Or it may not. Many of the records released this year have been redacted. Whether to lift these redactions is not yet decided, but will be decided by April 16, 2018. My hope is that where redactions are lifted, NARA will re-post these files, with the original text replacing the redactions. Anyone who is taking a vote on this, please note that my hand is raised in favor of re-posting.

Going back to the current release, #6 is rather complicated if you want to count what’s now available. NARA provides a spreadsheet of releases with lots of important metadata (here), but you still have to do some number crunching to get the correct figures. The remainder of this post will explain how I crunched. A follow-up post will raise some questions that I still have.

Spreadsheets, filenames, and RIF numbers

After each release under the JFKRA, NARA has posted a spreadsheet that gives important information about the records that are being released. The records are also posted online as either audio (.wav) files or pdf files. These pdf files are generally scans of original documents, usually produced by government agencies. Which records should be released was determined by the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent government agency established under the JFK Records Act (JFKRA). This law was intended to open up all U.S. government records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy to the maximum extent possible, and the ARRB adopted a VERY broad definition of what counts as relevant to the assassination.

NARA’s spreadsheet of records in the releases is cumulative. That is, there is not a separate spreadsheet for each release. Instead, there is only one spreadsheet which is updated for each release, with information on the most recently released records at the top of the sheet. The cumulative spreadsheet for the December 15 release has 35,557 rows, but this does not mean there are 35,557 files posted at NARA; to understand why, one needs to crunch numbers.

The two key bits of information in each spreadsheet row are the name of the file posted at NARA, and a RIF number. RIF (Reader Information Form) is a form developed by NARA and ARRB for use in a database of JFK records. The JFKRA mandated the creation of this database. An RIF includes a bunch of information, but the key component is the RIF number. This is a unique number which identifies every individual record in the database.

The relation between a document and a “record” in the NARA’s database is not simple. There are cases where the same document may have more than one RIF number. For example if the ARRB acquired the same document from two different sources, say a document from the FBI investigation of the JFK assassination, then a copy of that document from one of the government bodies that investigated the FBI’s investigation of the JFK assassination, these are usually treated as two different records. Another example would be where single components of larger documents are assigned one RIF number, and the larger document they came from is assigned another RIF number.

Another complication occurs in the NARA release spreadsheet. The simplest situation for the spreadsheet data would be if there was a one to one correspondence between the name of the file posted at NARA for each release, and an RIF number from the JFK database. In other words, each file represents a record in the database. This is not the case, however. Instead, a single filename may be listed multiple times in the spreadsheet, each time with a different RIF number. I discussed a number of these cases in earlier posts. A single RIF number may also be linked to more than one file. I also found several cases of this which I discussed in earlier posts. The cumulative spreadsheet for the 6th release has more of both of these. Hence the need for additional number crunching.

Release 6 counts

The revised spreadsheet for release 6 has an additional 4238 rows of record metadata compared to the spreadsheet for release 5. According to the NARA announcement, however, there are 3539 “documents” posted on the NARA’s website. This difference arises in part because in the new rows, there are many cases where a single filename occurs in multiple rows. Each row in the spreadsheet has a different RIF number, so this means one file is listed under different RIF numbers.

This, I believe, is what NARA means when it says

Within records released on December 15th, there are instances where multiple record identification numbers are associated with the same pdf. This is due to the fact that the files were scanned in batches.

I don’t understand what “files were scanned in batches” means or why it would cause this situation. But in any case, this explains, in part, the discrepancy between the number of pdf files posted at NARA and the number of spreadsheet rows. In one case, a single file posted at NARA is listed in 25 different rows. Unfortunately, most of the metadata is missing for these rows, so it is quite hard to say why one file should be listed so many times.

Multiple RIF numbers for one file does not completely resolve the discrepancy between the number of spreadsheet rows and the number of files posted on NARA, however. The second reason for this discrepancy is because there are 12 rows in the spreadsheet that list multiple files. This means that there are multiple files with one RIF number.

In the previous cases where I found this, the different files keyed to the same RIF number occurred in different releases, and it seemed that the later versions of the files either had extra material added or redactions removed. But in the case of the files in release 6 where multiple files are associated with one RIF, I have not yet figured out what is going on. As an example of this, there is one case where a single row with one RIF number lists four different files (RIF 124-10183-10291). When one adds up all these multiple files listed under one RIF, one gets another 15 files.

Summary

Summing up, there are 3510 files listed in the spreadsheet for release #6 which are associated with 4226 RIF numbers. There are also 27 files listed under 12 RIF numbers. 4226+12 = 4238 and this is the total number of new rows in the release 6 spreadsheet (new as compared to the spreadsheet for release 5). The total number of files in release 6 should therefore be 3510+27 = 3537. NARA, however, says there are 3539. I have not yet figured out where the missing 2 files are.

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