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

It always went back to dying books and microphotography. And yet Patricia Battin was well aware that, as she told me, “everybody hates microfilm.” There were two ways of alkalizing this hatred: the long-term way and the short-term way. The long-term way was to perfect digital successors to microfilm (since, as Robert Hayes wrote, “There appears to be high user acceptance 5of quality CRT display; why else would so many people watch ‘the tube’ so avidly?”) and begin converting the subsidized film scrolls as soon as electro-storage technologies had developed standards, or even sooner. The short-term way, though, was to scare “the masses” (to use Ellen McCrady’s word) into thinking that big-money microfilm was, for now at least, a necessary evil. In the world of research libraries, the masses are the faculty and students who use the collections. Over several decades, these groups had successfully been eased into the conviction that the replacement of original newspapers with rolls of transparent plastic was a historical inevitability; now they had to be persuaded, as well, that a planet’s worth of old books was at death’s door. That’s where the Scholarly Advisory Committees, or SACs, came in.

With the help of money from the Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Commission on Preservation and Access invited dozens of academics to spend some time in restful settings outside Washington (at the Belmont Conference Center in Elkridge, Maryland, or in Bellagio, Italy), where they would sit through presentations by Battin and others, read handouts, hear more presentations, talk earnestly about the task they faced, read more handouts, and return to their home campuses in a state of double-folded enlightenment. There was the Scholarly Advisory Committee on Art History, the Medieval Studies SAC, the Text and Image SAC, and the Modern Language and Literature SAC. “Making clear to scholars 6that their own perhaps narrow specialty is far from the only area affected is an early task in the development of a scholarly advisory committee,” the Commission’s annual report stated in 1992. “This awareness usually leads to the desire to spread the word — to inform colleagues of the impending disaster and to rouse them to action.” Eventually, the Commission’s various committees were expected to produce reports and (since two thirds of the brittle books would be allowed to die spontaneously) “help plan strategies for making the hard choices as to what and how to preserve.”

There were scholars who were somewhat puzzled by the proceedings. My father-in-law, Robert Brentano, a medievalist at Berkeley who was invited to participate in the Text and Image SAC, found himself explaining the usefulness to historians (and their students) of seeing the actual books and documents from a certain period, rather than many separate pictures of them. Others were completely taken in, used by the Commission to spread panic. Larry Silver, a member of the Art History SAC, delivered an addled talk at the annual conference of the College Art Association. He said that being asked to select what to preserve was “like playing God, or at least Solomon.” One had to play Solomon, said Silver, because wood-pulp paper was “filled with acid that literally causes it to self-destruct, like the tapes on the old television show, Mission Impossible. ” J. Hillis Miller, famed deconstructionist from the University of California at Irvine, wrote the final report for the Modern Language and Literature SAC. The Commission passed out copies of Miller’s report at its brand-new “modular brittle books display” at the Modern Language Association meeting in 1992: “Large resources need to be deployed to preserve as many books as possible,” Miller announced (that must have pleased the Commission!), and he said that “every possible action should be taken to educate our colleague[s] and our libraries in the magnitude of the problem.” Members of the committee were of course mindful of the value of “actual physical books,” Miller wrote,

But if these original books

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in all their copies and editions, along with all the papers in archives, printed or written on paper from the 1850’s to the recent past, are slowly burning up, then microfilmed or digitalized preservation is obviously demanded.

By then, Patricia Battin’s planful indefatigability — the articles, the newsletters, the roving exhibits, the scholarly committee meetings, the grueling international tours — had paid off substantially. The word “dust” had been singularly helpful, and the word “crisis” had been given a walk on the wild side, as well. Warren Haas, recall, had staidly said there was a “brittle books problem”; then Margaret Child said that there was “indeed a crisis”; then Vartan Gregorian told the congressional subcommittee that it was a “national crisis”; then Slow Fires called it a “universal crisis.” But in 1988, before Congress, Patricia Battin, never to be outdone, held up the shining orb of the National Endowment of the Humanities, which she says constitutes an “unparalleled resource to solve an unparalleled crisis.” Congress, marshaled by Sidney Yates and abuzz with the novelty of the disaster they were being called upon to relieve, nearly tripled the budget for the NEH’s Office of Preservation — soon to be renamed the Division of Preservation and Access, mirroring Battin’s Commission. A year later, Battin told Congress that embrittlement was “an unprecedented crisis”—no, wait, it was a “crisis of alarming proportions.” Congress scaled up the budget even more. Suddenly George F. Farr, Jr., a polite, plummy man who was then and is still the director of the NEH’s preservation program, had many millions to give away for filming projects. “The Endowment could not have advanced 9its current plan for brittle books without the groundwork laid by the Commission and, at an earlier date, by the Council on Library Resources,” Farr wrote. Hefty applications and testimonial letters came in from libraries, each describing a particular collection 10(a thematic subcomponent of American history, say) that especially deserved to have its pictures taken, page by page, before it succumbed. The review panels met; the winners were announced; the disbinding began. The Library of Congress’s Preservation Microfilming Office got a congressional budget-boost as well, so that its squad of camera operators could keep pace with the national effort. The civilization-saving plan to microfilm over three million books was under way.

In the first few years, the wave of soft money went mostly to libraries with existing photoduplication programs — Columbia, NYPL, Harvard, Yale, Chicago — but that changed as more universities created preservation departments of their own, hiring full-time preservation administrators to run them. The preservation administrator could perform a local deterioration survey that would produce some shocking percentages, choose an enticing subset of the collection to present to the NEH in a grant proposal, negotiate contracts with nonprofit or commercial microfilming shops, and convince the subject specialists in charge of that piece of the collection to come up with five or ten thousand brittle books. The institutionalization of the preservationist’s profession was one of Patricia Battin’s cherished dreams — indeed, just before she left Columbia, she had secured for its library school nearly half a million dollars from the NEH to train more fresh, green P.A.s. “We didn’t have a manufacturing infrastructure,” Battin explained to me. “I mean, how are we going to film all this stuff?”

There is a direct correlation between the spread of preservation administration as a career and the widening toll on old books. Battin wrote in 1988 that the “number of preservation operations 11in American research libraries has increased from about 5 in 1978 to more than 50 in 1988, as universities have acted to institutionalize the activities necessary for the preservation of scholarly collections printed on acid paper.” She adds: “And we haven’t yet begun to fight!”