Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

At another worktable lay parts of an enormous Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther: a conservator had gone over its surface with a tiny vacuum cleaner and painted over each of its letters with gelatin parchment size. In the Collection Care Section, the purpose of which is to deal non-violently with books from the library’s general collections, I admired the recently acquired pneumatic box-making machine, which stamps out custom-fitted boxes to hold books that in an earlier era would have gone under the lens, or to a commercial bindery to be reclothed in radiant pyroxylin (plastic-coated cloth). (The Library of Congress had a zealous rebinding policy for many decades — they sent books to the bindery rather than make minor repairs in-house, and thousands of ornate bindings were lost in consequence.)

All of this was genuinely impressive, and it helped to remind me of the befuddling divergence, in library language, between conservation and preservation. The two are no longer synonyms — in fact, they are more often antonymic, although library spokespersons have been known to rely on the lay confusion that surrounds their undisclosed redefinition. Conservation refers to the repair or restoration of the original object, the book or manuscript, the empirical, thumbable thing; preservation, on the other hand, though it may embrace the act of conservation, has more generally come to mean, in response to powerful euphemistic requirements, any act that carries on or propagates, in any chosen medium (e.g., the original pages, photocopies, fiche, film, tape cartridge, Microcard, diskette, CD-ROM, Norsam metal disk, and so on), the words or images of the original object. Thus preservation can mean dumping or other more remunerative forms of dispersal, whereas conservation never does, although of course conservational practices have at times caused unintentional harm. (The Scotch-taping of the Dead Sea Scrolls 02comes to mind.) Reversibility — the potential to undo what you or your predecessors have done — is a watchword of modern book conservation; book preservation, by contrast, is often irreversible, because the book is gone. “This cannot be emphasized 03too strongly — the filming process is often damaging and irreversible,” according to the primary textbook of the eighties, Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists. Often intentionally damaging and irreversible, one wants to add — for on the next page the textbook says: “It must be stressed 04that if you do remove bindings from bound volumes before filming, the quality of the film is usually improved, and the cost of producing the film is significantly reduced.”

So all conservation is preservation, but not all preservation is conservation. And here’s a troubling organizational fact: book conservators generally report 05to directors of preservation departments. This is true even though a book conservator’s training is a slow apprenticeship, over many years, while the preservation administrator needs but an extra year of library-science courses to earn the right to decide, or help decide, what to do with a stackful of artifacts about which he or she might know almost nothing.

Complicating matters further, the manager of the library’s reformatting lab (the microfilm and/or digital lab) also usually reports to the director of preservation. Thus the top person, the preservation administrator, or P.A. — who more often than not (although there are exceptions) has had no bench training and has only a slender acquaintance with the manual repair of books — has jurisdiction over two labs whose aims are in opposition to each other. The conservation lab wants to save the book; the preservation lab wants to “save” the book. The conservation lab costs money and progresses deliberately, item by item, sewing, gluing, restoring (although small fixes take only a matter of minutes) — and all of its work must go back on the shelf. The microfilming and digitization labs seem fast, because the planetary camera’s white über-flash and the scanner’s green underglide occur hundreds of times an hour, as on a production line, and though these departments have high overheads, they also make money, sometimes packets of it, through federal grants, state grants, foundation grants, and the selling of copies — and not everything that gets imaged has to go back on the shelf. (The New York Public Library had agreements with “various commercial publishers and micropublishers,” according to former director David H. Stam: “With few exceptions, 06the income and royalties from these publications have been put back into the library’s preservation programs.”)

So the P.A. presides over one department that pays at least part of its way with outside money and one that doesn’t; one that helps the library with its storage problem and one that doesn’t. If you were a P.A. — a real cost-sphinctering conehead (not all are, of course) — with the managers of those two departments beneath you, of whom would you feel fonder? When you moved up to a senior post, whom would you promote to your old job: the chief of the microfilm lab, who steadily pulled in money, or the chief conservator, who seemed only to be able to spend it? More than a few former spine-whacking micro-managers are now preservation administrators.

In the early eighties, Wesley Boomgaarden briefly ran the preservation-microfilming operation at the New York Public Library, where his crew filmed more than two million pages, or ten thousand book and journal volumes, per year (“a lot of material from the Jewish division,” 07Boomgaarden recalls, “a lot of material from Slavonic”); now he is the preservation officer at Ohio State. In 1988, writing in the pages of an anthology called Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, Boomgaarden nicely captured the tension that existed between preservers and conservators:

When my hard-working

08

preservation microfilming staff wheeled truck after truck of brittle volumes into the conservation laboratory each week — to use their “low tech” power cutter in the process of cutting off spines to make filming easier, faster, cheaper, and better — they were villified [

sic

] by the conservation shop staff and called “thugs” who were destroying books in order to save them. And, because of the accusers’ pitiful statistics in conserving those minute numbers of dainty things — we “thugs” in turn labeled our conservation studio colleagues as “pansies.”

“That was a long time ago,” Boomgaarden now says. “We’ve learned so much since then.” In a recent big preservation project that Boomgaarden led, “most of the filmed volumes 09[were] retained in the collections.” About five to ten percent of what is currently microfilmed at Ohio State is, by Boomgaarden’s estimate, thrown out — an improvement, at least. One crucial difference between then and now is that Ohio State has an enormous new remote book-storage facility; its space crisis has abated.

Iwas very glad to meet the talented people in the Library of Congress’s conservation lab, to be sure, but since I was trying to learn more about past and present microfilming practices, I was disappointed that Preservation Reformatting was not on the tour, too, as previously requested. I did get a chance, however, to have a talk with the library’s chief scientist, Chandru Shahani, a friendly man in a gray suit. On one side of the table, Dr. Shahani and I sat discussing things like the fold test for paper strength and the predictive value of accelerated-aging experiments; on the other side sat Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple. Kresh was Shahani’s boss; Dalrymple was a formidable woman from the library’s Public Affairs Office whose job, as far as I can tell, was to obstruct inquiry. The two women monitored the interview, saying nothing, taking a note from time to time.