Oct 03 2008
Two to six for Mr. Lorello
Daniel Lorello, formerly an archivist for the state of New York, received a prison sentence of 2-6 years and was ordered to pay $129,500 in restitution (and give up his personal collection, estimated around $80,000) for stealing documents and selling them to collectors. As you may recall from an earlier post, Lorello was considered to be an expert in Civil War documents, and authored The Union Preserved: A Guide to Civil War Documents in the New York State Archives. According to the article, 1,600 documents have been recovered so far. No word on how many documents actually left the building, but apparently Lorello had been pilfering them for profit since as far back as 1997.
Full AP article here.
2 Responses to “Two to six for Mr. Lorello”
Maybe this will serve as an example we can use when trying to enforce the ethical guidelines of our profession? We sure need such examples.
There’s a lot of press when a patron like E. Forbes Smiley steals from a library, and rightly so. But when someone charged with protecting the public trust is doing it– and apparently has been doing it since 1997– how can we prepare for that? Obviously I’d rather not have examples of wrongdoing like this, but when it does happen, we need to be using this within the profession as a cautionary tale. How can we further enforce that? I’m not sure. But it seems to me that most of our security precautions are based on keeping outsiders out of the collections, not keeping collections inside. Perhaps there needs to be more discussion about a shift in security perspectives.