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1930s Syracuse University football reels. Pulp science fiction magazines. Portraits of Albert Einstein, WEB Du Bois and Langston Hughes. The original writings, letters and manuscripts of activists, abolitionists and anti-fascists.

All of these one-of-a-kind artifacts are in the care of the League’s Special Collections Research Center, the vast archive of precious materials that the university largely stores on the sixth floor of the Bird Library. And without immediate intervention, professors familiar with the collections say many of these items will soon deteriorate to the point that their original content – and the history they preserve – will be lost.

“What we’re talking about is a rescue operation,” said Deborah Pellow, a member of the university’s Senate Libraries Committee. “It’s that simple.”

The university has a long history of monitoring the degradation of materials in its special collections, but damage to some of its most valuable artifacts was recently revealed when Pellow’s committee presented a report on the deterioration at a Senate meeting. from the University on February 24.

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During the meeting, Pellow and his colleagues presented a difficult scenario: At-risk materials – which include “tens of thousands” of films, books, manuscripts, photographs, negatives, and magnetic tape media – could deteriorate to the point of to be unrecognizable if they are not moved. to a temperature-controlled storage facility. And SU, which has delayed the construction of such a facility for several years, no longer has time to act.

“The problem is to stop the degradation of the collection,” said Pellow, professor of anthropology at SU, in an interview. “We cannot save what is degraded, but we can prevent it from continuing.”

The types of deterioration of SU archives are almost as varied as their content. Paper documents and manuscripts, such as the writings of abolitionist Gerrit Smith and old copies of the Daily Orange, become brittle due to their acidic nature. Audio recordings, including tapes donated by Dick Clark, are damaged by magnetic decay or, for some cylinders in the Belfer Audio Archives, by graphite from a nearby elevator.

Photographic prints in SU’s collection of famous photographer Margaret Bourke-White, whose report is valued at $ 98 million, take on a bluish tint. Without intervention, the tint will advance over the images, obscuring their original content, the report says.

“Photographic equipment, some of which deteriorated beyond the rescue,” Pellow said.

The solution to many of the deterioration issues is the same, committee members said: building a secure, air-conditioned addition to SU’s existing library storage building on Jamesville Avenue. According to the report, SU had designed, approved and planned to fund the facility – known as Module 2 – as early as 2016, but the university halted the project for unclear reasons.

Report of the Senate University Committee on Libraries, February 2021 by The Daily Orange on Scribd

The committee’s report alleges that SU put the project aside to make way for other construction projects, including renovating the roof of the Carrier Dome and the National Veterans Resource Center. In a statement to the DO, a spokesperson for the League denied that funds were transferred from the construction of Module 2 to the renovation of the roof of the dome.

“It is true that there have been major capital projects that have taken place since 2016, and they have prioritized health or safety issues or the student experience,” Chancellor Kent said. Syverud when he insisted on the matter at the Senate meeting. He said the scope of the project has changed since it was first proposed.

Library officials in the League recognize the need to act. David Seaman, dean of libraries, said in an email that the committee’s descriptions of the deterioration of special collections are accurate. A stable, secure and controlled environment like Module 2 would prevent further degradation of risky materials, he said.

SU originally planned for the pod to consist of multiple air-conditioned zones, with the ability to closely monitor temperature and humidity in each space, said Jenny Doctor, former director of SU’s Belfer Audio Archives. A separate space would allow materials to move slowly to warmer environments to avoid impact, she said.

The doctor, who left the League in 2016 and is now the head of the Albino Gorno Memorial Music (CCM) library at the University of Cincinnati, said the humidity in SU libraries was particularly damaging to students. archived documents.

“Humidity is almost more important than temperature,” she said. “We have to have completely constant humidity, and that’s the big problem at Bird and Belfer. Moisture is all over the map all the time, and that’s what’s really terrible about the collection.

The doctor, who praised the hard work of SU special collections staff with whom she worked during her time at SU, said it was around 2014 when SU ​​first noticed the effects of poor storage photographic negatives, which sparked a wider push to redevelop its storage facilities.

Almost half a decade later, how and when the university will move forward with the Module 2 construction project remains unclear. The university is exploring options to fund the project and sets a target date for its completion “as soon as possible,” Seaman said.

A previous statement by an SU spokesperson said the university had already allocated funds for the project, including funds committed by donors. During the Senate meeting, Syverud said that “substantial funds” had been raised for Module 2.

Regardless of how SU funds the project, building Module 2 will be expensive, especially for a university strapped for cash due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The committee estimated that the project would cost around $ 6 million.

Hosting special collections and maintaining the facilities and staff that preserve them is also a financial challenge for many universities, Doctor said. As a result, libraries often have to speak up to remind universities of their value.

“It’s expensive to take care of a special collection,” said the doctor. “Deterioration is expensive.

Paper documents and manuscripts in the League’s archives become brittle due to their acidic nature.Courtesy of SU Libraries

Several committee members acknowledged that SU is in financial difficulty during the pandemic, but they fear the university may no longer delay construction of a new facility. An inconvenient time is better than no time at all, they said.

“We can hold two different truths at the same time, and one of the truths is that the university is in dire financial straits due to COVID,” said Karina von Tippelskirch, another member of the committee. “At the same time, if I have a dying patient, I can’t say, ‘Okay, we’ll wait until after that. “”

Allowing materials such as those in the League’s special collections to rot is not only a disservice to future generations of League students and scholars, committee members said, it would also damage the international reputation of the League. university. Researchers have come from all over the world to view the documents in the SU archives, Tippelskirch said.

“The price of inaction is embarrassment among our peers,” Mark Monmonier, another committee member, said at the Senate meeting.

For some SU professors and students who have researched the SU Special Collections, decaying materials have immense personal value.

Tippelskirch is one of those teachers. She published a biography on journalist Dorothy Thompson using documents from the SU archives and in doing so, linked to her source material.

Thompson, who graduated from the League in 1914, was one of the main voices against the rise of fascism in Europe. As a foreign correspondent, she interviewed a young Adolf Hitler before he came to power – and his scathing rebuke of the future dictator led him to exile from Germany, although she continued to denounce the fascism both in Europe and in Europe. in the USA

Having access not only to Thompson’s published work, but also to her personal writings, has given modern scholars visiting the League’s archives an unprecedented glimpse into who she was, Tippelskirch said.

“You can’t get closer to a writer who is no longer alive except to engage with his papers and his handwriting, his typescripts, what he left behind,” she said. “We often forget these things because they are right in front of us. “

Tippelskirch noted that Thompson’s materials are not in the greatest danger of deteriorating compared to other items listed in the committee’s report. But some of Thompson’s photographs and manuscripts, especially those written on acidic paper, are starting to show signs of degradation and would benefit from being kept in a cooler space.

As SU works to establish a concrete timeline for the construction of Module 2, the university is also exploring interim solutions to mitigate the damage. The library may install smaller stand-alone storage units in existing facilities to house the most at-risk items until a permanent facility is in place.

But committee members expressed concern that all of the workarounds SU implemented to block the deterioration could be seen as a permanent solution – which they are not.

In the meantime, they said, items in the collections will continue to wither.

“What we need is a lasting solution that not only solves the problem we have now, but that will take care of it for years to come,” Tippelskirch said. “We all understand that a building doesn’t go up overnight.”

At the University Senate meeting, committee members presented another option, should the League decide not to build Module 2: hand over its precious materials to another university that could take better care of it. Seaman said SU had not considered giving up its collections and said the university is committed to preserving them.

Seaman and committee members agreed on the importance of maintaining the League collection, even though the future of Module 2 remains undecided. Their value, unlike their condition, will only increase over time, they said.

“We always have something new to discover when we have these materials,” Tippelskirch said. “They are not just about the past. They tell us something about the times we live in, where we come from.

Posted on March 9, 2021 at 12:57 a.m.

Contact Chris: [email protected]