So I'm as curious about the pending release of the JFK assassination records as anyone, and on a lark I downloaded the nearly four thousand files that were released back in July. I wasn't expecting it to be an easy task, especially since I don't have a particular interest in anything specific, but it became very apparent very quickly that this is not something you simply dive head-first into without knowing how to research.
So I'm asking a methodologies question: how does someone approach such a massive collection of files, especially when they aren't categorized or indexed in any particular fashion? And if it happens that you don't have a set research goal in mind, but you're just going through them to see what you find - searching through an entire field of haystacks just to see if you happen across a needle - there surely has to be a more efficient way than just starting at one end of a pile of unorganized files and going through them individually...?
You need to already know a lot about the files, the people, the subject background. If you do, it allows you to spot what is interesting, what is obvious, what is unusual. "Interesting" here means non-obvious, means unexpected, means humorous, means surprising, etc. — you need to know the "baseline" before you can identify what is "not baseline."
You have to sort it out. When I start with a big dataset I do a "first cut" where I immediately separate out the "totally dull" from everything else. With government files in particular you get a lot of redundancy — a side-effect of bureaucracy and duplication. When I do this digitally I really just throw everything boring into a folder labeled "NOT INTERESTING." (I don't get rid of it, but I keep it out of sight, out of mind.) How do you know what is interesting before you start? See #1.
You then have to organize it. Scholars have lots of different organizational schemes; there is no all-in-one solution. Hell, I use different schemes for different projects, because some are quick to use but not as useful (e.g., just notes in a Word doc) and that is sometimes fine for a project of small size; some are much more flexible (e.g. a fully-featured database) but that always takes time to get working. Sometimes I have undergraduates who work for me to help with some of the "basic" level data entry (e.g., filename, date of document, title of document if listed, author if listed, etc. — even just a VERY basic schema like this goes a long way).
You look at as much as you can look at. If you are digitally-savvy that can sometimes be a lot (I have enough computer experience to program my own databases, write scripts to help sort things, etc., and the result is that I am generally able, I believe, to see more documents in a given amount of time than most of my colleagues, but that is unusual). But whatever you do, it always takes time. It takes judgment. It's a major undertaking. It can't be done quickly or idly or by someone who hasn't put in the hours to learn enough about the subject matter to make heads or tails of it. It's a form of expertise. All forms of expertise take time.
I am always glad when new documents are put online. But most people cannot effectively use them, and we should expect a considerable amount of nonsense to be associated with them. Goes with the territory, of course...
I recommend mendeley, or zotero. They are for academics sorting sources, and you can take and read the PDFs in the program. They can also be organized in folders, and mendeley let's you highlight and take notes in the program. That will help you sort them. As for interesting, u/restricteddata had a good suggestion for it.