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

shady entrepreneurs

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anxious to cash in on quick profits from micropublication schemes. Unfortunately, with the exception of the largest professional producers, malpractice is often the rule rather than the exception.

One interestingly shady practice was the offer to take old bound journals and newspapers in trade for new microfilm. A library would allow a film salesman to pick up several hundred bound volumes, expecting to get a microfilmed set in return. But the microfilm wouldn’t arrive, and the salesman would begin spinning stories, and the volumes were never seen again — sold to dealers. A man named Charles Venick, who reportedly “perspires a lot,” worked the substitution scam on librarians in California, Iowa, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma in the late sixties and early seventies, until he was finally arrested. One library lost bound volumes “valuing in excess of $10,000.” Murray Martin, who first exposed the practice, wrote that librarians were seeking the benefit of “disposing easily and profitably 4of shelf-eating stock.”

But these deals didn’t always end unhappily. Pamela Darling, head of the preservation office at the New York Public Library in the seventies, wrote in Library Journal that one way to pay for microfilming is “to cooperate with micropublishers 5who plan to market microform copies. In most such cases, the library will receive free film in return for the loan of the original material; reprint fees or royalty payments on sales are sometimes involved.” Since as a rule, according to Darling, once the microfilm is obtained, “the original material may then be disposed of” (except for rare books), this sort of arrangement “can be of great benefit to the library,” if entered into cautiously and carefully.

Financial inducements to get rid of originals by offering free filming continue today. In 1998, Heritage Microfilm, out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa (which did a lot of microfilming for Iowa’s NEH- and state-funded newspaper project 6), had this come-on on its website:

SPECIAL OFFER

FREE filming for newspapers with a subscription to your own film. Call 888-870-0484 or email us for a quote on your next filming project.

(They’ve removed it now; now their website says “We will return your documents after filming if desired. Or, material will be destructed after a 90 day holding period to ensure you are completely satisfied. All destroyed materials are recycled.”) The digital world has picked up on the swap offer, too — the Mellon Foundation’s JSTOR project recently offered libraries a thirty-dollar credit against annual database fees for the first five bound volumes of a set that a library donated for scanning, five dollars per volume after that. If you weren’t a JSTOR subscriber, they would send you a check. If you wanted to “loan” the volumes, JSTOR would pay or credit you twenty dollars per volume, five dollars per volume after the first five — that is, if you allowed disbinding and didn’t require that the loose remains be boxed individually. (Suppose you let someone borrow your car and they returned it to you as a pile of scrap metal, along with a photograph of it. Would you define the transaction as a loan?) In this way, JSTOR gets fresh journal sets to chop and scan, and at the same time, by including a financial incentive for libraries to reduce their nonvirtual stores, they sharpen the need for centrally sourced digital surrogates. The more physical texts that leave the shelves, the more electronic copies must go through wires, which makes the people who control the tariffs on the wires happy: one form of marketing for preservation.

Yes, the seventies were, writes one historian, the “gilded age 7of microforms in libraries,” but there were signs of rebellion even then. In the pages of Microform Review, Stephen Salmon published a critique of microfilm’s quality and usability: “Let’s suppose that the user 8has found the microform he wants, found a reader, and somehow managed to get one mounted on the other. Then what does he see? The answer seems to be: all kinds of things but not necessarily what he might expect — fingers; smudges and stains; scratches; dirt and dust; text cut off in the margin; missing pages; images reversed, upside down, or out of order; and assorted blurs, caused by improper lighting, improper contrast, poor resolution, and lack of proper focus.” Salmon also quotes a survey respondent who said that microfilm was “an information burial system.” 9

And then there was the question of longevity. Reviewing microfilm’s silver-emulsional troubles in 1978, Carl Spaulding, at the Council on Library Resources, pointed out that since libraries don’t usually store their film at the extremely low humidity levels specified by industry standards, “the plain fact is that 10almost no libraries can claim to have archivally permanent film.” He ended with a series of bluntly bulleted recommendations, of which the first was: “Most libraries abandon the delusion that their microform collections are permanent.” Well, then, why bother? Unless the desire to save space overrides all other motives, why struggle to reproduce books and newspapers in salts or vesicles or silver gelatins that may well not last as long as the originals would have?

The reason Spaulding gives is interesting. He, like many others who were once stimulated by microphotography, was already, by the late seventies, tiring of it, and responding instead to the high-pitched digitarian dog whistle. It is difficult to believe, Spaulding predicted, that in fifty or even twenty-five years libraries would own lots of microfilm; it seemed to him much more likely that “information now commonly recorded on microform will be stored in electronic form in a few central locations to be accessed from any one of the countless online terminals.” We needn’t worry about microfilm’s deterioriation, Spaulding implies — we’ll be throwing it all out anyway.

You might expect, with all of microfilm’s woes — the illegible early projects, the user-resistance studies that showed a widespread dissatisfaction with the reading experience, the periodic lapses of quality combined with the practical impossibility of checking for lapses, the frauds and malpractices, the abandoned formats, and the various physical afflictions that the film itself was heir to — that preservation visionaries would have become cautious, by the mid-1980s, in their plans to “salvage” major collections by this means. Instead, the preservationists’ scare numbers grew, and their imagery became more extreme, as they gradually learned how to sell the problem of aging books as a crisis for the civilized world. They spoke with one voice, as Warren Haas hoped they would, but what they said was increasingly estranged from reality.

Margaret Child, a consultant for the Council on Library Resources and a former NEH strategizer who had attended Haas’s brittle-books summits, wrote in 1985 that in order to build a preservational infrastructure, “we need massive infusions 11of ‘foreign aid’—subsidies from government and private foundations, direct funding by local and national governments, and the diversion of institutional funding to preservation programs of all kinds.” University administrators must be “persuaded that there is indeed a crisis serious enough to demand diversion of substantial amounts of funding,” and scholars “need to be targeted,” 12for although they are the “primary users of the materials endangered, [they] remain remarkably unsupportive of any kind of reformatting.” (Unsupportive, possibly, because they know the tribulations of microfilm, and the boon of having the original book in hand; with a very few exceptions — such as Randy Silverman, the director of preservation at the University of Utah, who is an expert in nineteenth-century bookbinding — preservation librarians don’t do the kind of historical research that would require them to give their library a regular workout.) Moreover, says Margaret Child,