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

Leave the books alone, I say, leave them alone, leave them alone.

We will never know how much capital the Library of Congress spent on organometallic R and D over those decades — the costs were bundled 1in and hidden. Millions more were tossed into the other gaping preservational cash pit, the Optical Disk Pilot Project, an early digitization experiment also pushed by William Welsh and Peter Sparks. By Department of Defense standards, the amounts were minuscule, but they were lost at a time of great hardship for the library — when operating hours and staff were being cut — and their redirection has left our historical record compromised and disfigured. With all the money the library spent noodling with fire in a vacuum, and testing the longevity of the acrylic layer on soon-to-be-outmoded optical disks, they could have put up several large, unflashy, dimly lit, air-conditioned print-shelters out in Virginia or Maryland that would have kept millions of low-use books, newspapers, and bound periodicals out of the summer heat, shelved in call-number order, awaiting their infrequent summons. (The library did rent some space, in Landover, 2Maryland, beginning in 1976, but it wasn’t nearly enough.) The library’s scientists could have spent those decades learning more about the chemistry and aging characteristics of old paper, rather than studying the behavior of an exotic metal alkyl on old paper. Coolness is pertinent because, as with cut flowers, film, diskettes, or hamburger, lower temperatures slow down intermolecular couplings and scissions and thus attenuate time’s asymptotic slide. One study in 1966 compared a long-frozen Everyman’s Library edition 3of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination —it had traveled to Antarctica with Scott’s expedition and wasn’t retrieved until 1959—with the identical edition from used-book stores in Manchester and Glasgow: the paper in the polar Poe was stronger.

There were knowledgeable staff members during this period — most notably Peter Waters, Head of Conservation — who argued that for the vast majority of books, simply placing them on a shelf somewhere was the best and cheapest first step to preserving them, but Deputy Librarian Welsh’s heart was not in adding raw shelf storage. Welsh is, he told me, a people person — when he was at the library he knew hundreds of employees by name, and even now he immediately remembers lesser figures from fifty years ago, such as Clyde Edwards, the man who began systematically replacing newspapers with microfilm. Welsh is not a book person. He is the last of the Cold War librarians 4—he arrived in 1947 after six years in the Air Force, where he was promoted to major and served as librarian of the Alaskan Division Headquarters of the Air Transport Command; he rose under Clapp and Luther Evans, worked on the CIA-sponsored East European Accessions List in the fifties, wrote the foreword to Newspapers in Microfilm in 1972 (the one, that is, which said that a microfilmed newspaper was considered complete if only a few issues per month were missing), and was made deputy librarian in 1976. Welsh believed that libraries shouldn’t be regarded as “warehouses of little-used material.” 5(Actually, that’s exactly what they are.) Though he boasted that the Library of Congress produces “vastly more than the microfilming 6programs of any other library” and that “we probably produce more [microfilm] than all other libraries put together,” he felt that film didn’t squeeze things down enough. So he turned to optical disks: “Disk storage is attractive 7because it is very much more compact than film — ten to twenty thousand pages on one side of a twelve-inch disk, compared to about a one-thousand-page capacity on a single reel of film,” he wrote. And the thousands of tiny copies on the twelve-inch disks are actually easier to read than the originals, Welsh held: “the extremely high resolution 8of the electronic scanning process improves the accuracy of the captured image, even making it possible to improve the readability of a faded or discolored original.” The scan is better than the original — and if it’s better, why keep the original? The digital process will, according to the Library of Congress Information Bulletin for September 12, 1983, “reproduce items with sufficient quality 9to permit the library to consider discarding the original.” In 1984, Welsh told The Washington Post that his optical disk jukeboxes could reduce the three Library of Congress buildings 10to one. As it turned out, the resolution of the images on the disks was a migraineiferous three hundred dots per inch — six hundred dpi is considered middling now — and the twelve-inch format never caught on. Copyright holders made strenuous objections, too, as they will when someone is trying to re-publish their work without paying them.

Ainsworth Spofford, the late-nineteenth-century director of the Library of Congress, collected books and built new wings and fireproof buildings to hold them. John Russell Young and the great and glorious Herbert Putnam collected more books, and Putnam built a huge annex that opened in 1939. Then came Archibald MacLeish, a poet of some anthologization, who became distracted by the idea of using the library for military intelligence and war propaganda. 11(In 1941, MacLeish signed a letter of agreement 12with OSS founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan, undisclosed to Congress, which, for an initial fee of seventy-five thousand dollars plus expenses, committed the Library of Congress to intelligence-gathering for Donovan’s new Office of Coordinator of Information; the library would, for example, “build up biographical data on key men in public and military affairs in foreign nations.”) With MacLeish came the hiring of Luther Evans and the promotion of MacLeish’s personal assistant and vision-man, Verner Clapp. No storage edifice went up during Clapp’s long years of influence. That is why, after Clapp left the library to invent the new tomorrow by hiring defense contractors, Quincy Mumford inherited a collection that was, as he told Congress in 1958, “bursting at the seams.” 13But Congress was slow to respond to Mumford’s plea. In the end they combined a project to build a memorial to James Madison with the library’s request for a new building, and the architects, straining mightily, came up with the colossal, marble-finned kitsch box 14now permanently stuck to Independence Avenue. There are bronze sculptures of flying books welded above the doorway, covered with chicken wire to keep birds from perching on them.

Never mind the architecture, though: the building wasn’t ready to store anything until 1980. From the forties through the eighties, while other government agencies built like pharaohs, the country’s pre-eminent records-storage-and-retrieval system didn’t have, largely as a result of Clapp’s philosophical disdain for mere shelves, enough room to hold what it needed to hold. Welsh inherited the ill-starred Madison building, and he oversaw it after his fashion, but he stood in Verner Clapp’s long shadow, and he was by temperament and training a steady-spacer. Libraries should not grow, they should “grow.” In 1989, he was still extolling the virtues of “interdependence” and “miniaturiz[ing] existing collections.” 15(As soon as library managers start talking about resource sharing, or cooperative projects, or interdependence, you know they have local shelf-clearing in mind: they want somebody else to keep what they once had.) “Networking can and should 16enable us to avoid costs,” Welsh wrote. “If we can depend upon the network to help meet some of our needs, we can reduce our acquisitions, cataloging, and preservation costs and, perhaps most important, defer construction costs for new library space.”