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

Battin went on to tell me that a German company, Herrmann & Kraemer, has developed advanced book cradles “which allow you to do a good job of filming without disbinding the book. We didn’t have those at that time.” Battin is correct that such cradles exist. But the best U.S. microfilming establishments — Preservation Resources and NEDCC — do not use them. It is possible to film all but the most tightly bound books well with a traditional cradle, it just takes longer: almost all programs do less disbinding now than they did at the height of the craze in the early nineties, even though they have traditional cradles to work with. The desire to disbind, then, was independent of what was technologically possible. “I think by and large if we were going to do as much as we thought the majority of the scholarly world wanted, we had to disbind,” Battin told me, “and then the book wouldn’t go back on the shelf.”

We could save more books for less right now if we destroyed more books right now, and we had to act right now because it was a “disaster of major proportions,” and we knew it was a disaster of major proportions because corners were breaking when space-craving preservation administrators running microfilm labs folded and pinched them. George Farr, the NEH’s preservation person, was on board 5with this cross-eyed logic; and in the early years of NEH funding, with the Slow Fires panic and Battin’s cost-saving mass-production strategy uppermost in participants’ minds, filming activity often took a “vacuum-cleaner approach,” as it came to be called. Operators bundled off whole stack-ranges that were determined to be at risk, rather than going through the shelves book by book to figure out what physically ought to happen to individual items: it takes time and therefore money to sort a shelf-full of books into “basket cases” (a widely used and wonderfully elastic term for books in bad shape), books that may need minor repair, and books that were merely published in the acid-paper era and are otherwise okay. “Yes, I’m sure there are books that were microfilmed that probably were not that brittle,” Battin says now. “We had great debates among the populace as to whether you took the collection approach or the individual-copy approach, and decided for the initial filming grants that the collection approach made the most sense.” To me she quoted the French adage, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Of course, the bad can be the enemy of the good, too.

Yale was one of the big libraries that took the collection approach. In a paper about a microfilm-to-digital experiment at Yale called Project Open Book, Paul Conway described one of the challenges the conversion team faced. “Slash and burn preservation,” 6 he named it: “For some key collections in a single library, most of the brittle books are now gone.” Determining the dimensions of an original page or the fidelity of its microfilmed reproduction is “severely hampered,” wrote Conway, “if the original volume is in a landfill.”

“We had to slash our way through these collections in order to save them”—that was the thinking in the eighties and early nineties, Conway said when I reached him. The sense was that “these books were on their last legs, if not already dead: ‘Put them out of their misery and move on to a better technology.’ The first seven or eight years of large-scale microfilming had that mentality.” (Conway was not director of preservation at Yale during that period.)

I asked him if the sudden surge of NEH money had perhaps seduced libraries into destroying the very things we meant them to preserve. “Yes, we were seduced,” Conway said. Yale’s American history collection, for example, took a hit early on. “Half of what was there is now filmed and not on the shelf anymore. And everyone was seduced. But at some point we started waking up and saying ‘Wait a minute, this is crazy.’ ” In a recent NEH-funded project, Yale filmed twenty-one thousand books, and they threw “maybe two hundred” away, he said. Like Ohio State, Yale now has a new remote-storage warehouse, where books are sorted by size rather than by subject, and shelved in arbitrary order in computer-indexed cardboard boxes on thirty-foot-high shelves that you reach on a cherry picker. “There’s a lot of criticism about them because they’re not browsable,” said Conway, “but what those buildings have effectively done is make space a non-issue.”

Libraries everywhere, one is told and wants to believe, are now dispatching many fewer books than they were ten years ago, in the heyday of Battin’s hatchet fever. Jan Merrill-Oldham, Preservation Librarian at Harvard, wrote me that Harvard is currently filming nine to ten thousand “brittle volumes” per year, of which only one or two a month are completely disbound and guillotined. (In a partial disbind, the prep person cuts some of the threads, loosening the book so that it can open flatter under the glass pressure plate.) One of Harvard’s recent NEH grant proposals states that “approximately 7 % 7of all volumes filmed as part of this project will require disbinding or removal of folded pages prior to microfilming. Disbinding is a strategy of last resort.” But Merrill-Oldham insisted that even the seven-percent figure was “an artifact” (numbers, like lucky books, can sometimes attain artifactual status), produced by cutting and pasting the language from older grant proposals. “There are very few libraries these days that do the kind of discarding that went on right at the beginning,” she says. “We just hadn’t pulled it all together, I don’t think, right at the beginning. And I’m not sure that libraries should be faulted for feeling their way to some kind of solution. It’s not like there was tons of help all over the place.”

At Columbia, when I called (December 1998), David Lowe’s NEH-funded technicians were working methodically through the business and economics stacks, classifying books as Brittle or Not-Brittle by using their variant of the double-fold test. If the book was brittle, they checked the binding. If the binding was damaged, they designated the book as a “BD”—Brittle and Damaged. If it was a BD, and it was published after 1850, they segregated it for “selector review,” the selector being a librarian with expertise in the book’s subject area. He or she was to decide whether the book merited microfilming (if no film existed somewhere already) and whether or not to reshelve it. “If it’s a ‘Reshelve No,’ it’s basically a withdraw,” Lowe explained. The selector took circulation into account. “I think I said, ‘If it’s circulated in the last ten years I think you should consider reshelving it,’ and the selector said, ‘Maybe twice in the last ten years.’ So that’s the sort of thing we get involved in.”

I said to Lowe that I wished that the classification of an item as brittle wouldn’t act to seal its doom. “Well,” Lowe replied, “when you’re pressed for space and you’re only given so much money to build new places for books, you start thinking, ‘Hmm, microfilming, and then get rid of them, that makes a lot of sense.’ It’s administrator-think, and it’s convenience, and most of the stuff isn’t circulating that much.” (Circulation is, however, a meritless measure of a book’s interest or usefulness in a research library; interests change from one generation to the next.) Lowe couldn’t offer any estimates of the percentage of books disbound; he did say, though, that they had just finished filming several thousand “pams” 8(pamphlets), and most of those were cut apart in the process and thrown away. “I mean, they don’t have much of a binding to begin with,” he said.