"In a library where everything is catalogued, it's exciting to find something unknown," said Nancy C. Schrock, chief collections conservator for the Harvard College Library.
But librarians were cautious about assessing the significance of any of the items.
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"We take the find at face value because [the items] may be of very modest historic value. This may be as good as it gets," Merrill-Oldham said.
Library officials will soon begin to investigate who put the items in the vault and what their motives might have been, Leahy said.
"We don't even know who might have known at one point," Leahy said.
Merrill-Oldham said that a further assessment of the artifacts will probably be available at the end of the month.