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

Then Hayes (whose Ph.D. thesis for the UCLA math department was entitled “Iterative Methods of Solving Linear Problems on Hilbert Space”) performs a last operations-research calculation that I’m not sure I can follow. Five of the ten duplicates for every unique microfilmed title are, under Hayes’s model, going out the back door, but even so, Hayes thinks that once the shutter has stopped clicking over a given book, a library will save money on interlibrary-loan costs connected with it—$149 in present value per microfilmed original, he estimates. He gives no costs for the duplication of the microfilm that would make interlibrary loans unnecessary; he talks about various forms of alternative delivery (“online, download”), but he assigns no financial outlays to them — the high-speed digital backbones will apparently be free. Never mind — for Hayes’s purposes, the enormous “savings” on forgone interlibrary-loan costs gets us past the break-even point. The project is not a wash, it’s a profit. As a nation, we would end up richer if we spent $358 million to microfilm 3.3 million tragically doomed books and threw out sixteen million tragically doomed duplicates: we would save space, save money, and save civilization, too.

Fremont Rider would have been proud.

It was a national emergency. So Congressman Pat Williams of Montana believed. He and his staff had gotten the story from Warren Haas, who was using the numbers he’d gotten from Robert Hayes. On March 3, 1987, Congressman Williams’s Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education assembled a group of experts at an “Oversight Hearing on the Problem of ‘Brittle Books’ in our Nation’s Libraries.” “Today,” Williams announced, “many documents 1that represent this Nation’s cultural and intellectual heritage are literally eroding away.” Acid paper was the culprit; “librarians tell us that millions of books in America’s libraries are now in great danger.” The principal solution, in Congressman Williams’s considered opinion, was microfilm — lots of it, and soon. “It is our Nation’s very memory that is at risk.”

The testimony that followed was vigorous and persuasive. Daniel Boorstin, accompanied by Deputy Librarian Welsh and Peter Sparks of the Preservation Directorate, tendered as fact the notion that each year at his library seventy thousand volumes were moving into a “dangerously brittle state” 2—a numerical whimsy that Sparks had been passing around to reporters for years. “Across the country,” 3Boorstin said, “in libraries and learned institutions, in every State of the Union, books are becoming so brittle that their contents can only be salvaged by microfilming and then only if funds are available soon.” Vartan Gregorian, who was at the time head of the New York Public Library (and a member of Warren Haas’s Commission on Preservation and Access), told the hearing room that seventy-seven million volumes in the United States were “facing extinction” 4(Robert Hayes’s estimate, plus a million, and with an injection of endangered-species rhetoric), and he compared his staff to “French generals 5in charge of triage” who must take care of the “immediate death problem” for some books while “putting others in nursing homes, and some others in ambulatory care, while waiting for their turn.” Gregorian held up what he called “almost a dead book” 6—the history of a French town during the Battle of the Marne. “We have resurrected it through microfilming,” he said. He closed by quoting the slogan of the United Negro College Fund—”A mind is a terrible thing to waste” 7—and said that “we stand to waste the fruit of many minds, indeed, many cultures, if we hesitate in our response to this national crisis.”

Lynne Cheney, the new chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, said: “Our thrust at the Endowment 8has been on intellectual content rather than on the book itself”—hence the Endowment’s predilection for microfilming over low-cost book repairing. The problem of brittle books “has only been in the forefront 9of my mind for eight or nine months now,” Cheney confessed, but still, the carnage had to stop: “As we speak, the war continues, and every day Dan Boorstin gets 6,000 more bodies brought into the Library of Congress.”

One of the congressmen asked Cheney for some cost estimates, and she used Robert Hayes’s: “We are dependent upon people 10to whom we give grants to come up with figures for the amount of money needed to save these [volumes]. The Council on Library Resources estimates that in order to film 3 million volumes over the next 20 years, $358 million is needed, or about $15 million annually.”

Carole Huxley, an official at the New York State Education Department (who had also participated in Haas’s brittle-books committee), offered no corpses or French generals, but she did assert that what was going on in the New York State Library was a “calamity.” Brandishing an old book, she said: “Our research houses 11are on fire.”

Eventually, it was Warren Haas’s turn. The time had come, said Haas, for the federal government to “join in the task 12as a constructive partner and to do its share.” Lots had been accomplished already, “but a kind of giant step 13is needed…. I have just no question that the time is right.” In recent years, the general public has begun protecting historical buildings, Haas observed; now, as a mature society, we must do the same for our documentary past:

The purpose of the work

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we have set for ourselves is to protect the human record as it is and has been. In this cause, we have the advantage of starting with collections that have been assembled by librarians and scholars over more than a century; we already have what has been judged important at many points in time.

Let’s think for a second about what Warren Haas has just said. He is quite right. It is a marvel, for which we should all be thankful, that libraries have such breadth and multifariousness. It is no easy thing to make a great library. It doesn’t just happen — it is something that nineteenth- and twentieth-century librarians (and legislators, university presidents, boards of directors, faculty members, and rich people, too) decided was worth doing, for themselves and for us. It took three hundred million discrete acts of inclusive judgment to build the empires of locally available paper that we inherit and use, and we would like to be able to pass on this congregated boon to those who follow, trusting them to do the same. Trust makes it work. Now, imagine if the National Trust for Historic Preservation asked Congress to devote fifteen million dollars a year to the making of measured architectural drawings and floor-by-floor blueprints of thousands of old buildings in need of repair, and then, once they had “intellectually preserved” the ogives and molding profiles and pediments and interior vistas of these buildings, tore half of them down. “The books themselves, 15as items, cannot be saved,” Haas declared, “but their contents can.”

The crisis offered a major opportunity, as well. Once a library has saved the “contents” of a book, Haas told the assembly, “new technology suggests that there may be additional ways to use the item”:

It is not unlikely,

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I think, that the wealth of film that we are building up as a national archive can be used to convert to digital form for reading on a computer terminal, for using it as a base for printing a new edition in small numbers.

Haas doesn’t stress the point: it wouldn’t do to give the impression that the government was being asked to provide venture capital for a prodigious electronic-publishing venture. But in fact that was the plan: get money now to have a whole lot of “endangered” (and incidentally out of copyright) material shot on film, then digitize from the film later, for ease of access.