- Stark, Bruce. "The Archivist as Detective; Or, The Case of Ledyard v. William Morgan," American Archivist 67 (2004): 269-92.
In this account, Bruce Stark describes a security situation that occurred at the Conneticut State Library in Hartford between 2000 and 2002. In short, the staff of the library discovered that certain records which they believed had been in their custody were found in the Archives of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Complicating matters was the fact that the staff of the research center believed that they had obtained the records legitimately from a dealer. The staff of the state library believed the records were stolen. The missing records created a firestorm of controversy that launched the state library into media attention for well over two years.
Stark describes the research or detective methodology the staff of the state library used to determine their legitimate ownership of the records. Eventually, the records were returned, and the explanation for the crime was that the records had been stolen and sold by a man who stole large numbers of records from the library twenty years earlier. The man had been caught and imprisoned shortly after he stole the records, but the staff of the library was unaware that these records had been stolen. From this account, Stark draws several conclusions about the value of records, security, and keeping good records about collections.
