Provided below are leading books, films and records centers for materials about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. The Justice Integrity Project is maintaining this list as part of our Readers Guide for the 50th anniversary of the killing on Nov. 22, 1963.

The inspiring story of the late Mary Ferrell, a Dallas legal secretary, shows how a dedicated individual with no stake in the outcome aside from a passion for justice helped create a major archive assisting researchers through the generations. She and her husband, Buck, shown at right, began building an archive soon after the shooting. They believed Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest just an hour after the killing was strange. They bought a copy of every local newspaper and added materials through the years.

This evolved into the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a Washington, DC-based non-profit that contains over 1.2 million pages of documents, government reports, books, essays, and hours of multimedia open to the public.

The story illustrates the passion, patriotism and organizational prowess of researchers — and why such research should not be solely by officials and other professionals.

My new book, Presidential Puppetry, further illustrates the continuing importance of the JFK murder for reasons amplified later in this Readers Guide series.

Today’s installment is not meant for casual reading. Instead, it is best regarded as a reference source if you are looking for something specific in terms of a book, film, or archive.