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by Eva Ives Interviews Editor, A.R.T. Publications Committee

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Courtesy of Sheridan Sayles.

Sheridan Sayles is an archivist based in New York City, where she manages the Memorial Sloan Kettering Archives, including answering historical questions and handling donations of unpublished MSK and MSK member materials. She has a BA in English from University of Mary Washington, a masters in Public History from Rutgers University, and an MLIS from University of Maryland.

Eva Ives is an archivist, librarian and researcher based in New York City, where she has used her archival background and fascination with artists’ archives to inform her work on several digital catalogue raisonées projects and a print monograph. She currently manages the digitally published Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné. Eva holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from Hunter College and an MLIS from Pratt Institute.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Eva Ives, Interviews Editor, Metropolitan Archivist (MA): Can you tell us a little bit about the Memorial Sloan Kettering archives’ inception?

Sheridan Sayles, Archivist, Memorial Sloan Kettering (SS): Of course. So, there’s been, almost from the beginning, some sort of library presence. I was doing some research into our photographs and found that in the early 1900s, for example, we had both a library and a museum…[the museum] seems to have folded after a decade or so. The next evidence I have of a library or archive is in 1947, and it was founded as part of the Sloan Kettering Institute’s opening. We opened a primary library, Lee Coombe Library, named after the daughter of [Sloan Kettering Institute co-founder] Reginald Coombe. It’s interesting to see that there were different lives that these records had and entirely different repositories that they evolved from.

There was also a library committee — practitioners within MSK who were interested in supporting the library — and then as early as 1971, 1973, there were talks about formally putting together the archives in advance of the centennial. MSK was founded in 1884, so the first archivist was hired in line with the Centennial [in 1984]. So it was mainly a love child of the committee, just certain members who were very interested in the history of medicine and the legacy of MSK and the research that they were doing. Not in a huge step, but they got the ball rolling. So what we see of the archive today was from the early 1970s.

MA: I’m thinking about the iterative nature of how these records were collected and housed by different institutions then. Are you aware of any notable gaps in the records, and do they reflect anything particular about the time or content?

SS: I’m going to flip that the other way: our collecting strengths are reflective of when there was the most investment in the archives, so we have a very strong collection of materials from around 1940 until around 1970. That coincides with the founding of the archives and a real push to get more of that material together. I think there was more incentive with the Centennial to partner with different departments within MSK and that’s far and away our biggest strength.

And now that I have been hired (I started in 2022), we’re starting to develop more current practices and strength in collecting. One of my big recent wins was I established a relationship with our Communications department and I collected around 500 gigabytes of digital photos that range from 1998 to the present. We have our strongest collecting when there was an effort to collect.

MA: Could you briefly describe your background, and how you came to be working at MSK?

SS: I have a kind of mix: it’s mostly archives background, but my education is a little bit in museums as well. For my undergrad, I actually have a minor in museum studies and did a lot of museum work — like exhibitions and collections management work as an undergrad — and then I went to University of Maryland for my graduate program and was fully archives-focused there. My actual work experience has been a little bit all over the map: my first position was as a Congressional archivist — I worked at Rutgers University with the Senator Frank A. Lautenberg Papers for three and a half years. I temporarily worked at Trinity Church on Wall Street — that was very short-lived, like five or six months — and around that time, I also got an offer from Seton Hall University. I was the Technical Services Archivist there, and the actual collections were also kind of all over the map. But political archives were my strength, at that time, so I worked with the political collections very heavily. We also had a fair amount of religious materials, especially due to close connections with the Archdiocese of Newark. So, I did have a little bit of experience dealing with death records at Trinity Church and Seton Hall, and then this position [at MSK] opened up.

MA: I can see how that background would inform processing and interpreting the collections that MSK has. Can you share a little bit about the types of users that you’re engaging with most often? Are they primarily external historians, or do you have a lot of internal groups that you interface with?

SS: The longer I’ve been in this position, the concentration of researchers has shifted. For years, there was an internal directive to keep records as closely internal as possible. When I was hired, the focus really changed, and this position now reports to the library. We have a duty to support internal stakeholders, but also the larger medical historical community. And essentially, that entirely flipped the reference model. I’m not exaggerating when I say that all of our finding aids were either handwritten or typed in the typewriter. Analog to the extreme!

MA: Wow, that is wild. So you’ve done a huge overhaul already then with getting ArchivesSpace set up. Congratulations!

SS: Thank you. My entire first year was just very deep in ArchiveSpace and Excel. And I have an example here, I can show you what our registers look like, just because we have multiple copies. And this one with tabs, you can see it’s just typed on a typewriter.

It worked very well for the previous archivists, so it’s fine. I’m not going to judge anyone’s working practices. She was doing reference internally with a few external requests. As an outside researcher, you kind of had to know someone. And this year alone, I’ve had three external researchers. We get anywhere from 30 to 40 questions a year, and it’s definitely on the uptick, since [the finding aids’] publishing. The collections are getting used more and appreciated.

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Typewritten register of finding aids from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Archives. Courtesy of Sheridan Sayles, MSK Archives.

MA: Do you train internal staff [to use the archives] or do you kind of want to keep them having a more active relationship with the archives? Are you trying to impose a self-serve model at all?

SS: It’s more of a function of how our records are stored. Right now, all of our records are stored off-site, as we are in a transition period. There was a full research library in the Rockefeller Research Lab on 68th Street, and that building was partially demolished to make way for a cancer treatment pavilion. So, right now, the entire library is online as of May 2025, and I’m currently looking for a permanent space for the archives. We have a temporary arrangement right now with the New York Academy of Medicine, so I have a little workspace there where I can do things like scanning for certain stakeholders, and I’m working with two physicians right now on the histories of their department, so I’m collecting materials. And we are able to use their reading room at the New York Academy of Medicine.

MA: Sounds like you’re making do with a flexible, evolving scenario. How have digital programming and collections shifted your approach over the last few years? And are there any specific challenges or opportunities that have surprised you?

SS: I think it’s definitely built the sense of urgency, just because of the fragile nature of digital collections. I’m still at a point where I’m trying to build more internal relationships and it’s definitely been a challenge with general turnover. That’s true of any organization, but especially with a STEM-focused audience.

We recently got a contract with LibNova, and specifically we use LibSafeGo, which is a lot like Preservica — it has a full sync with ArchivesSpace, so we’re able to migrate our whole hierarchy into LibSafe. I described it to one of my stakeholders as: “We built the bookshelf, and then we take the books and put them on the shelf with LibSafe GO.” It’s definitely helped with intellectually connecting a lot of these loose baskets, and being able to communicate that this software has the ability to render access, migrate files, etc. That’s been a very good communication point with them.

MA: Coming back to Metropolitan Archivist, on the issue’s subject of “human,” what are some of the challenges of documenting human life, movement, or the body in MSK’s archives?

SS: I think what’s interesting about MSK is that we are both an in-patient treatment center and a research organization. We do actually have a fair amount of human research data and some medical records within our collections, but they’re very sparse. We have some surgery registers from the 1890s, the 1920s, and I think one from the 1950s. It’s a good way of understanding the changing relationship of what information you would include in a patient’s record and also how that was documented, and knowing when certain kinds of procedures were even medically available.

We have a full run of our Annual Reports from 1884 to 2014, and we actually got a digitization grant through the Metropolitan New York Library Council to get those fully digitized. This can offer a fuller understanding of what discoveries were made public, and what research at the time was thought to be significant.

MA: And for the issue’s dual subject of “nature,” how are you responding to threats of climate change? Are there any other broadly environmental issues that might be impacting preserving memory or the physical materials in MSK?

SS: There was a really interesting paper that came out in 2019 or 2020, looking at how 20% of physical books are handled very, very much and the other 80% aren’t really touched. We are similar with digitization. And reading that caused me to be very mindful about what we digitize, and I try to look at user metrics as a guideline for how to move forward. So, for example, our annual reports are very heavily used. But everything else, I’m just kind of seeing what the ties are.

For every researcher I’ve had come in, I like to save a document that includes every collection item they use, and if I see enough overlap, I might think, “Okay, this is something I will digitize, if there’s some kind of sustained interest in this.” When I was hired, there was kind of a push to digitize everything, but what are we doing except adding more gigabytes to Amazon Web Services? It is also a bit of a disservice to my users because they’re going to get buried in unnecessary things. Instead, I can be a bit more pragmatic with my time as well as more cognizant of how digitizing for the sake of digitizing is not good for the world. I think every organization does kind of have to walk a continuously drifting line sometimes, and I think a lot of that is just how you shape your own metrics.

MA: Does climate change come into your planning for MSK’s physical collection at this point?

SS: We were looking at one space for the archives and the first thing I pointed out was the location — do you want to put me in the subbasement? It’s right next to an emergency exit, and all it takes is a plastic bag in a rainstorm to cause that area to flood. So this would not be a safe space for the collections.

Otherwise, a lot of what I’m getting at this point is born-digital. There’s been an interest in, for example, collecting our email records and at a certain point, you have to ask — is this hoarding, or is this actually collecting the history of our institution?

MA: Is there anything else potentially unexpected or surprising about the human experience or natural world that has come up in processing, planning for, or activating the resources in MSK archives?

SS: It’s really interesting how much of a moving target death is in our modern experience. My first real encounter with death records on a meaningful scale was when I was at Trinity and I had to work with burial records, and these weren’t that old, like within my grandparents’ lifetime. Just the number of children dead from communicable diseases; from a typical page of this burial record, I would see “baby Johnson, age two: whooping cough; this child, age twelve: cholera.” Things that are so treatable today.

And so much of how we think about death today. For example, I don’t have any kids yet, but if I were to have three kids — outside of a crazy situation like aggressive cancer, birth defect, accident — I would have three adults. And my grandparents’ generation could not say that. My grandmother was one of three and there were two adults. It really makes you appreciate how much medicine has advanced over the years and just not take for granted what you have access to today. And I’m not going to say every medical advancement has been the most ethical thing in the world, but the iterative nature of science and medicine has not only gotten the ethics better but they’ve gotten survivability better, and we really live in a very fortunate time.

My grandmother had a sister, Shirley, who was on the 1920 census and then died later that year of dysentery. Then my mother was born in 1950 and she remembers taking the polio vaccine on the sugar cube. It does give you a lot of gratitude for advances in medicine, advances in supportive care, all prognosis advances.

MA: Do you feel like there’s been a bit of political attention drawn to MSK’s archives with how the topic of vaccines has been so politicized lately?

SS: Yeah, I will say it’s caused me to be a little bit more reflective on the reference questions we get. Almost as soon as our ASpace instance was up, we started to get more reference requests, as you might expect. I don’t know if I necessarily want to say that we had very obvious bad actors reach out, but we did have a few more people reach out who were kind of cagey about what the topic was. They’d say, “I’m working with this organization, we will pay to digitize these items so we can get access to them,” and then the second and I ask a follow-up question like, “I do have to get this specific department involved, so what’s the nature of the question?” — crickets, never heard from them again.

I do need to work in the institution’s best interest, especially right now, with so many organizations getting funding cuts and general anti-science sentiment. We do have to be cognizant that even though in our world we are doing our best to make information available, and the goal of discovery is to improve the quality of life of everyone, there are some people who don’t see it that way.

MA: Glad you’re there doing it. It’s very true: archival practice is a constant negotiation. Constant, thoughtful, and very much a verb: “collections care.”

SS: Even outside of the medical context, I’ve found I really need to do my best to contextualize without putting words in the creator’s mouth. It’s a hard balance regardless of what type of collection you’re working with and that’s one of the joys of being involved in organizations like the Archivists’ Round Table, seeing how other archivists are approaching that, and being very mindful stewards of their collections.

MA: Absolutely agree, well said. Thank you so much for taking the time to field my questions!