October 2019 News Wrap Up
By Colleen Theisen, Chief Curator
October always comes to a close with Remembrance Week, the annual weeklong series of events planned by the Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars, which was held Sunday, Oct. 20 through Saturday, Oct. 26. Remembrance Week events are meant to honor the victims and further educate the campus community about terrorism - both historic and contemporary, foreign and domestic. The Special Collections Research Center is home to the Pan Am Flight 103/Lockerbie Air Disaster Archives. The Archives’ collections provide the Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars with resources for understanding the historical significance of the disaster, and for learning about the lives of the victims. Our Pan Am 103 Archivist & Assistant University Archivist, Vanessa St.Oegger-Menn, works closely with the Scholars throughout the year to ensure their events and programs fulfill the Remembrance motto: Look Back, Act Forward. To learn more about the Remembrance Scholars program visit remembrance.syr.edu. Information about the Pan Am Flight 103/Lockerbie Air Disaster Archives. In addition, October is one the busiest months of the year for classroom visits in the Special Collections Research Center, supporting 24 class sessions.
Finally, this month several members of the SCRC staff took a trip to visit the Sue Ann Genet Costume Collection located in the Fashion Design Program in SU's Nancy Cantor Warehouse for a tour led by Jeffrey Mayer and Kristen Schoonmaker. SCRC Curator Courtney Asztalos, Mayer, and Schoonmaker are pictured together in the above header. They recently acquired examples of 1920s-1940s swimwear, including Jantzen brand suits to complement the Jantzen Swimwear Photo Album we acquired earlier this year. You can read about the photograph album in our July 16, 2019 blog post.
The Jantzen diving girl logo.
Music Library Association visits the Belfer Audio Archive
Recap of Public Events:
Remembrance Week was October 20-26th and you can watch highlights from:
October 24, 2019. Remembrance Chair Memorial
October 26, 2019. Recording of the Rose Laying Ceremony
October 26, 2019. Open Archives
October 27, 2019. A gallery of photos from Remembrance Week in 2019.
October 25, 2019. The New York State/Ontario chapter of the Music Library Association visited the Belfer Audio Archive as part of their annual meeting. The Belfer Audio Archive, a unit of SU Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center, is the nation’s first purpose built audio preservation facility, having existed at Syracuse University in various forms since 1963. The archive houses approximately 500,000 audio items, ranging from Edison’s earliest experimental tin foil recordings to born digital items, with collections focused largely on the early 20th century. Belfer is home to the country’s third largest collection of cylinder recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mentions in the News:
September 27, 2019. University Archivist Meg Mason featured on WAER, "Her Hilltop High: Pink, Pea Green, Azure…Then Finally Orange."
October 24, 2019. Photos from SCRC used in Daily Orange story about students who escaped Flight 103 tragedy.
October 25, 2019. Note from Thomas Edison to B.C. Forbes from Special Collections mentioned in Forbes article.