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Re: New York tragedy-- locally



I agree with those who say we should record these days, it's our
responsibility as archivists.  (It's my responsibility as a professional
not to respond as I might like to those who have suggested that
this is somehow our fault or that we should not respond; besides, I
don't want to be filtered out).  Here at the University of Utah, my
first notice was my wife, who came panting back up the hill from
walking our youngest to school as I was on my way to work.  Then
on the way to work I passed the VA hospital, which is just off
campus.  It was barricaded and policed heavily.  Our library vans
were parked across the loading dock.  We all spent the day
numbed by it all, students and staff alike; it was one of the few
times I've seen large TVs put up in the library lobby for people to
watch events (the others being the Challenger disaster, the OJ trial,
and Utah Rep. Enid Greene's tearful resignation speech).

Our first thought here was, of course, the Olympics; it's our first
thought for everything now, being at the epicenter of the Village, the
venue for the opening and closing ceremonies, and so on.  Even
when one of my staff told me a month ago that she was expecting,
my first thought wasn't to congratulate but to think "Right during
the games, too!"  Of course Olympic planners are thinking security
but I daresay that SLOC won't have any trouble getting their extra
funding for security now.  Security was expected to be tight, but
now I can imagine that it'll be a blanket.  Our other concern was
just across the atrium, and across from our reference desk, is the
Aziz Atiya Middle East Library.  Now that it's looking like there are
Middle East connections people will start lashing out, and it could
be a target.  Nothing has developed so far, and there is not a large
Middle Eastern community in Utah, although what there is is here
at the University of Utah.

My oldest daughter told of seeing a classmate of hers, a boy she's
grown up with, whose family is from Iran, crying in the school office
yesterday as his mother came to take him home; I can only
imagine the cruelties heaped on him by junior high kids.  We have
an interesting perspective on this aspect in that one of my staff is
Japanese-American; her parents were teenagers in California at the
time of Pearl Harbor and both were interned.  She has researched
the internment at some depth and has helped us build collections
to document that period.

We can only do the same; document this tragic episode.  The
suggestions about newspapers are good ones, and I plan to bring
the idea up at a staff meeting tomorrow.

And the only way to get through this is to get back to work,




Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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