St. Mary's Schoolship Records, 1853-1958

In 1974, in conjunction with the college’s centennial, Carol Finerman, a graduate student in the Palmer School of Library Science, was hired to organize the Maritime College archives held at the Luce Library. According to a report by Finerman, “all the items that accumulated came in separately; none were deposited as a series of records from the offices of origin.” This is not necessarily surprising given that the school did not have a land base until Fort Schuyler was dedicated in 1938, or a professional librarian on staff until 1946.

From the late 1940s through the 1970s, librarians such as Terrance Hoveter, Filomena Magavero, and Richard Corson actively solicited alumni, faculty, and staff for materials documenting the school’s early history. However, these materials remained largely unorganized until 1974, when Finerman was hired.

Because the provenance of much of the material was unclear, and the records had not been transferred from administrative units, Finerman elected to create an alphanumeric classification scheme for the collection. Within this scheme, the records pertaining to the St. Mary’s schoolship were organized under the letters A (St. Mary’s-Institutional) and B (St. Mary’s-Students). Container lists for these records were part of an Institutional Records inventory that eventually ballooned into a 300 page+ word document.

In 2017 the library embarked on a project to bring the college archives into the 21st century, creating a new organizational scheme and finding aids for the records in ArchivesSpace. As part of this project, the archivist re-processed the St. Mary’s records, rehousing the materials for preservation and bringing intellectual clarity to the arrangement. Given that the provenance and original order of the materials had already been disrupted, the archivist imposed her own arrangement based on the content of the items. Proper archival description, in adherence with Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), was also created for the first time.

Some items were obtained from other institutions, such as the National Archives, as part of efforts by the early librarians to document the school's history, and mixed in with the original documents. During re-processing, the archivist elected to leave reproductions in folders, as separating them would have been a tricky and time consuming process.

Carol Finerman's report "The Organization of the Archives at State University of New York Maritime College," 1975, provided much of the background information for this processing note.

This project was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Documentary Heritage Program of the New York State Archives, a program of the State Education Department. The collection was processed by Project Archivist Jannette D'Esposito under the supervision of Archivist Annie Tummino.