The list is impressive. It now consists of about three thousand items, including such diverse entries as the original typed manuscript of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, some papers and diaries of the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, genealogical and statistical records, maps, lithographs, and hundreds of signed letters, among them missives from George Washington, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Davy Crockett.

Even more disturbing is the fact that the list is incomplete. Major thefts take place regularly, but the SAA cannot keep track of everything. Many archival institutions simply do not report lost or stolen articles—not merely out of embarrassment, but from fear that potential donors might have second thoughts about bundling up great-great-grandfather’s Civil War letters and giving them to an archive for safekeeping. Also, in many instances, losses go unreported because they remain undiscovered. Philip Mason, director of the archives at Wayne State University, has declared that the SAA register may represent as little as 5 per cent of actual losses.

Some people, as might be expected, steal for money. Perhaps the most notorious such thief was one Robert Bradford Murphy, a particularly slick operator who systematically looted the collections of at least one hundred institutions—including the National Archives—in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and sold the material to manuscript dealers and collectors. When finally apprehended in Detroit by the FBI in 1963, Murphy had six suitcases stuffed with stolen papers, as well as shipping receipts for an additional fifteen cartons of material he had sent to Chicago. He got ten years in federal prison, but his kind has nevertheless increased. “Back then, there was one Murphy,” Mason asserts. “Now we don’t even know how many of them there are.”

Even so, professional thieves account for only part of the problem. Too few of today’s students are trained to respect or properly use original source materials; what they need, some simply take, with a casual ignorance of what they are doing. Then, too, some professional researchers, driven by a kind of proprietary arrogance, convince themselves that they alone truly “appreciate” such material, and it finds its way into the ubiquitous briefcase. Amateur genealogists sometimes stumble upon troves of personal history and spirit them away. (“If these are the family papers, then they belong to the family—right?”) Finally, there are the part-time, unprofessional thieves—graduate students, professors, and even archival employees in search of a little extra money.

The situation has become so serious that many large institutions have installed security systems quite as elaborate (though not always as effective) as the antibomb checkpoints of modern airports. Smaller organizations—local historical societies, and libraries, and the like—have neither the staff nor the resources for such protection. Many do not even realize the dimensions of the problem. The SAA does and, in an attempt to meet it head-on, created a security consultant service in 1975 with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For the payment of a fee, such organizations can receive expert