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On Oct. 7, a Syracuse University Remembrance Scholar discovered antisemitic messages from two Pan Am Flight 103 victims, twins Eric and Jason Coker, in the SU’s Special Collections Research Center.

Visiting the Pan Am 103 collection, which contains personal belongings of the victims, is a responsibility of each year’s Remembrance Scholars, who SU selects to represent each of the 35 students who died in the terrorist attack in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The antisemitic messages had been submitted to the archives sometime between 2007-2013, raising questions from this year’s scholars as to how the materials went undiscovered until now.

Archives are often underfunded and understaffed, with backlogs of materials awaiting processing, said Janine Biunno, an archivist with 15 years of experience who now teaches at the Pratt Institute’s Graduate School of Information Studies.

“It’s a lot of work, to take materials that have been donated or acquired, and get them to a shelf or into a database and ready for people to access,” Biunno said.

Where are the archives, and how are they accessed?

While the sixth floor of Bird Library houses the research center and reading room, some materials are kept in climate-controlled storage on South Campus or at the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive building next to Bird Library.

SU students may visit the reading room throughout the semester, but making an appointment ensures the material they want to view is ready and available, said Meg Mason, university archivist at SCRC.

The only materials that may be restricted are student records, in accordance with the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act, or certain university records, such as Board of Trustees records. The university restricts Board of Trustees records for 50 years from their creation date to protect privacy and confidentiality, Mason said.

SU’s SCRC, which includes the university archives, preserves over 4,000 archival and manuscript collections,15,000 rare books and printed materials and over 460,000 audio and film material, said Nicolette Dobrowolski, assistant director of collections and access services.

Where do items come from, and how are they processed?

While every institution may choose a different method or follow their own practices, there is an exact science to archivism, Biunno said.

University collections tend to be strictest in adhering to best practice, and university archivists almost always require a master’s in library science or library and information studies, Biunno said.

At SU, the university archivist and assistant archivist are responsible for handling materials that arrive by donation or purchase from the university, Mason said.

When new material arrives, the first step is to take official custody of the item and document a summary of the donation into a database. The university will also send a letter of acknowledgement to the donor if the material was donated instead of purchased by SU.

SU archivists then arrange unsorted materials into folders and boxes and describe them in a finding aid, a document explaining an archival collection. Some collections comprise hundreds of boxes, and archivists don’t have time to view each item individually, Mason said.

“We have a large backlog of unprocessed collections that we’re slowly chipping away at. New acquisitions may be put in the queue to be processed, but not everything gets into the queue immediately because we only have so many processing archivists,” Mason said.

There are currently 13 library staff members and two staff members from the Libraries Acquisition and Cataloging department in the SCRC, Mason said. Some undergraduate and graduate students also either work or intern at the collections.

The professional staff members consist of archivists, curators, librarians, directors, a conservator and area supervisors, Dobrowloski said. Curators verify artifacts for validity based on the context of the acquisition and the source’s relationship to the material or to SU, Mason said.

There are no laws outlining standards for possessing archived materials aside from privacy laws like FERPA or intellectual property laws, Biunno said.

The university collections does not undergo any third-party audit, but does follow the code of ethics and guidelines from the Rare Books and Manuscripts section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association and the Society of American Archivists, Dobrowloski said.

How might an item be lost and uncovered?

While not common, it is possible for smaller materials to go overlooked in archives if they were cataloged at a box or folder level.

Last week, a film scholar from Indiana University in Bloomington uncovered previously unacknowledged footage of the oldest surviving film from a Black company in the Library of Congress. The film is just one of more than 173 million items in the Library of Congress.

In 2017, the United Kingdom’s National Archives admitted to losing thousands of government papers on some controversial moments in 20th Century British history.

Because archives have so much material to sort through, it’s common practice to prioritize making important materials accessible immediately over thoroughly processing them first, Biunno said. Ideally, every archivist would like to have information on each item, but obtaining that isn’t practical, she said.

“In terms of things being lost, it really has to do with how well it was organized in the first place,” Biunno said. “Pre-digitization, it was a lot harder to keep track of things at an individual level. There’s a chance something was glossed over in cataloging, it might have been cataloged at a folder or box level, and people didn’t know there was sensitive material inside.”

Although it’s far from best practice, Biunno said, there’s always the possibility an archivist chose not to catalog a specific item. There’s no way to know exactly what happened to an overlooked item, she said.

“If there’s any one challenge, it’s that there’s too much information,” Biunno said.

Published on October 19, 2022 at 10:33 pm

Contact Sarah: scalessa@syr.edu | @sarahalessan