Anna Shuff G’26 has been contriving ways to spend more time in libraries since she was a kid.

“When I was very young I regularly attempted to extend visits to the public library indefinitely by running away from my mother to go hide in the stacks,” Shuff says.

In that way, she says graduating with a master’s degree in library and information science from Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies to pursue a career in librarianship is just a culmination of her yearslong quest to never leave a library.

“I was drawn to a career in libraries because I love to learn—I love finding information, expanding my knowledge of the world and helping others to do the same,” Shuff says. “My choice to pursue archival work in particular emerged from my longstanding interest in history. I’ve always been fascinated by historical objects, whether they take the form of books, personal writings, textile or other materials.”

Pursuing that passion for preserving and caring for the historical record, Shuff spent the summer working in the University Archives, where her biggest project was processing a major addition to the collection’s Bishop Truesdell Peck Papers. The task offered her the “incredible experience” to put into practice the skills she’d learned working in the Archives and from her time at the iSchool.

“The practical experience I obtained in the Archives will serve me for the rest of my career, and I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work in such an incredible place,” she says.

Putting Classroom Learning to Work

With her interest in history, Shuff focused her studies at the iSchool on archives, special collections, museums and the preservation of cultural heritage.

Shuff says pursuing a master’s degree is an extension of the work she’s been doing for years, since she started volunteering for her local science museum as a teen and has found ways to work in libraries and museums ever since (during her undergraduate years at Bryn Mawr, she minored in museum studies).

She began working as a student archivist assistant at the University Archives in January 2025, but her work with the Peck papers offered some unique challenges.

Previously, the collection related to Peck, a Methodist minister who helped found Syracuse University and later served as Dickinson College’s tenth president, was small and consisted mostly of his diaries.

The new materials Shuff worked to process, which were donated by Peck family descendants, included correspondence, writings, printed material and ephemera, which took time to inventory.

Also, some of the papers had survived a fire, and as a result, many had smoke and soot damage.

Shuff says the challenge allowed her to apply lessons she learned from a conservation and preservation course with David Stokoe, the University’s conservation librarian. She used a vulcanized rubber sponge to clean a portion of the papers impacted by the smoke and soot. The remaining papers affected by the fire will be tackled by the next student working in the Archives.

The Peck collection is about six or seven times larger with the addition of the new materials.

“There turned out to be quite a bit of material related to Syracuse University, including a copy of his agreement with the school to donate $25,000 after his death, as well as early drafts of the bylaws for the Board of Trustees and correspondence with other important individuals in Syracuse University’s history,” Shuff says.

A Model of Experiential Learning

Shuff, who received a Libraries’ Student Employee Award, says her experience working in the University Archives was one of the “most valuable aspects” of her time at Syracuse.

“I worked up from processing very small collections, some as small as a single folder or item, to those as large as the Peck papers,” she says. “I learned how to author finding aids, how to accession collections and even got the opportunity to work with a campus publication, Salt Hill Magazine, to acquire their collections for the Archive.”

University Archivist Meg Mason said in her nomination for Shuff’s employee award that the iSchool graduate student was always committed, not just to the mission of the archives, which are part of the Special Collections Research Center in the University Libraries, but also to learning as much as she could during her time with the department.

“While doing research for patrons, arranging and describing archival materials, writing social media posts and reaching out to other students about donating records to the University Archives, she not only serves SCRC but also the Libraries and the University as a whole,” Mason wrote.