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

And marketing was the key, it seemed, because marketing pulled in money. At the same preservation conference at which Gay Walker recounted the sorry state of Yale’s Sterling stacks, Peter Sparks gave a brief pep talk called “Marketing for Preservation.” Charities, he told his fellow folders, raise an “amazing” amount of money every year — over forty billion dollars in 1979. But the competition was keen:

To get a piece of the action,

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an organized, systematic approach must be devised to convince donor agencies that one’s cause is worthwhile. Library preservation is a salable item; one must simply formulate an approach that will convince donor publics to invest substantially in this cause.

What was the systematic approach going to be? How could library leaders repackage the idea of mass microfilming in such a way that it would leap to a top spot on the worthy-cause roster?

Warren Haas, Verner Clapp’s successor (after a brief interregnum) as president of the Council on Library Resources, had been meditating on these questions for a long time. He was a deep believer in Barrow’s Deterioration of Book Stock, Causes and Remedies, and an equally deep believer in microforms. (Microforms haven’t returned the favor: Haas’s undergraduate thesis 6on British book censorship is available on microfiche, but the copy I got through interlibrary loan was faded to the point of unreadability, although I was able to print legible pages by changing the print setting to “negative,” so that the type stood out white on black.) In 1972, the year of Verner Clapp’s death, Haas chaired a committee on preservation for the Association of Research Libraries, and wrote its final report: Preparation of Detailed Specifications 7for a National System for the Preservation of Library Materials. (The work was supported by a grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.) Haas proposed that a consortium of big libraries embark on a “planned program of microfilming” that would include “collective ownership of any master negatives produced as part of any text preservation project.” The ownership of the masters was a matter of some concern to a library director like Haas, because, as he explained, “much master negative microfilm 8made from volumes in research library collections, at times even at the sacrifice of the original volume, is now in commercial film vaults.” The microfilm business had boomed — companies were selling enormous motley collections on “ultrafiche” 9(very high reduction microfiche) to libraries who needed to build up their title counts fast. (In a later CD-ROM era, such a product would be called “shovelware.”) Haas’s consortium would in effect become a micropublishing and reprinting concern to rival commercial micropublishers; the marketability of collections they microfilmed, Haas believed, “should weigh heavily 10in initial preservation program designations, both for the potential income and the high level of program visibility.” But before they could get their consortial shutters clicking, they would need money. A program of the scope that Haas envisioned would require, he wrote, “federal financial support 11of great magnitude.”

To raise money, Haas felt that they would have to “expand awareness among the general public”—and among librarians — and to do that they would need a set of traveling exhibits about paper and its decline, and a “carefully written and well designed booklet describing the dangers of collection deterioration,” even perhaps a film. 12

Haas couldn’t get all this rolling in 1972, but he was a patient man. Jack Sawyer, president of the Mellon Foundation (and former OSS outpost chief in Paris 13), liked Haas’s “savvy, shrewdness, 14battle-weariness, and enthusiasm,” and had him installed as head of the Council on Library Resources; by the mid-eighties, Haas, with the horrifying fold-test statistics from Yale and the Library of Congress in his back pocket, was ready for a second big push. In 1986, he wrote and published a yellow booklet, carefully written and moderately well designed, called Brittle Books. (No author appears on the title page, but when I asked Haas who had written it, he said, “I wrote it.”) The booklet summarized several meetings of a certain Committee on Preservation and Access (meetings paid for by the Exxon Education Foundation), whose attendees included the Library of Congress’s own Peter Sparks and William Welsh, Sidney Verba from Harvard, Gay Walker from Yale, Harold Cannon from the NEH, and other interested parties. “Careful analytical work 15undertaken in several leading libraries confirms that books printed on acidic paper begin to deteriorate rapidly fifty years or so after publication,” Haas wrote in the little yellow book. (No analytical work undertaken anywhere confirms that; if anything, acidic paper deteriorates more slowly after fifty years, as available reactants are used up.) A fourth of the volumes in old, large research libraries are “so embrittled that they will soon become useless,” Haas asserts, citing Yale’s survey and the others — brittleness being defined as a paper’s liability to break “after one or two double folds of a page corner.” We must preserve these books and, just as important, provide “wider and more equitable access” to them. The goal of the microfilming effort is to create “a new national library of preserved materials.” Books with intrinsic value (those with “important marginal notes,” for example) ought to be “safeguarded as artifacts”—but for most brittle books “reproduction of content is the only realistic course of action; otherwise, an important segment of the human record will be lost forever.”

There, that’s how to market it. Tell the people that if libraries aren’t given the money to microfilm these books (and to chuck them out when they’re done, but probably best not to stress the chucking-out part too much), people will lose the human record forever. That will get them to listen. “Extraordinary means for capturing the attention of a wide and diverse audience must be found,” Haas wrote. “The Committee is agreed that those who are concerned with preserving our intellectual heritage must speak with one voice if funding and participation are to reach required levels.”

Haas was himself a dogged fund-raiser, and he soon convinced the Exxon Education Foundation to give the Council another grant of $1.2 million; part of the money would found a regional microfilming service-bureau called MAPS (Mid-Atlantic Preservation Services, later Preservation Resources) and part would help pay for a movie. Haas began interviewing filmmakers.

By this time, the microfilm industry — University Microfilms and the other commercial micropublishers and service bureaus, along with the big library labs at the New York Public Library, Yale, Harvard, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, and the Library of Congress — needed a major crisis of paper deterioration in order to divert attention from the many misfortunes besetting their own medium. Library users did not like microfilm, that was clear, and they didn’t like microfiche any better — whether spooled or cut into rectangular sheets, the microphotographic medium was a bust. Even some formerly enthusiastic librarians were becoming more cautious about buying lots of microtext for their collection — the entire micropublishing industry had acquired a faint cheesiness of tone. Allen Veaner, of Microform Review, mentions the sixties influx of federal money for “collection building” 1in college libraries: some libraries bought lots of film or fiche in order to boost their title counts quickly to a level that would allow them to receive one kind of accreditation 2or another. Overheated demand increased the number of micropublishers, and some of them were, writes Veaner,