John J. Burns Sr., Boston College Class of 1921 and namesake of the Burns Library.
John J. Burns was a lawyer, judge, and alumnus of Boston College (1921). His son was a major benefactor in the development of the Burns Library throughout the early 1980's and it was wholly his contributions which made the archive possible. "Burns and his family funded the renovations and met challenge grants to build collection endowments; Burns even directly purchased some of the collections in the library himself." In 1986, the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections opened its doors at BC and quickly began to house Fr. Leonard's Liturgical collection (1).
The archive has a few facets which make it a unique research facility for the academic community at BC and beyond. The three-floor facility is located inside of Bapst Library, one of the oldest and most famous buildings on Boston College campus. Items can be requested and retrieved from our temperature and humidity-controlled storage units, and then safely handled and observed in the designated reading room. Everyone who enters the Burns Library to access archival materials gets a crash course on care and handling of these artifacts, such as wearing gloves or using cradles and page-weights. These are all small things which, in totality, help to preserve the archive's items yet still allow for a full research experience when handling rare or extremely old materials.
The Liturgy & Life collection is but a small component of the materials and topics covered by the Burns Library. There is an extensive collection of Irish and Irish-Catholic records, making it "the most comprehensive collection on Ireland outside of Ireland" (2). Burns also houses records of urban planner, Jane Jacobs, as well as the correspondence of 20th century author Graham Greene. From the Salem Divines to the personal library of the first black lawyer in the United States, Robert Morris, to a testimony from the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Burns Library has an incredibly diverse collection of artifacts serving a wide spectrum of research interests.
Today, almost 40 years since the founding of Burns Library, our collections also represent previous areas of collecting concentration, like Liturgy & Life. One of the ways that Burns keeps fresh is to rotate hallway exhibitions which feature items centered around a specific theme. The current exhibition is called Nature & Solitude and focuses on the tranquility that has come to some of humanity's greatest thinkers when alone (3). By putting things on display, visitors can ascertain a sense of the types of materials and formats they can find within our holdings (4).
There are many additional items in Burns Library that don’t fit easily in one collecting category, and there are categories that Burns Library does not cover. Critically, the library recognizes that "much of our collection centers the perspectives and experiences of White men. We work to acknowledge and discuss this bias, and to provide the scaffolding to contextualize how to understand the structures in place today. We also actively pursue adding materials to the collections that represent a broader, more diverse experience" (5). Understanding gaps in the collection and inherent biases of collecting staff is absolutely necessary for the future of the library, which hopes one day to lessen the dominance of historically overrepresented populations and instead, use resources to represent a full scope of experiences.
Part of the endeavor to increase student engagement with archival materials comes to fruition in the form of class instruction. At Burns, we hope to first break down the anxieties surrounding handling very old or fragile materials. By supporting intellectual inquiry and scholarship through an active engagement with primary and historical resources, Burns staff is able to assist students, particularly students who have never had an experience like this, in the process of finding, evaluating, and applying primary sources' information in their work.
Burns Library's website notes that "There is no singular, 'right' way to bring special collections into the classroom experience, and we are open to all disciplines and many different approaches...We work to demystify special collections and demonstrate that not only are these unique materials accessible to all, but that they can be incorporated into classwork in a variety of ways. We teach research skills, not subjects" (6).