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

Nobody has yet tried to do what Tanselle repeatedly recommended, though: he suggested that we store somewhere all the casualties — books, journals, or newspapers; bound, disbound, or never bound in the first place — of mass-microfilming or preservation photocopying. “A central repository 10could be established for receiving the books, if the libraries that possessed them before microfilming did not wish to keep them,” he wrote in 1989; and four years later, “Although it is a pity 11that the Commission did not make such a repository a part of its plan, it is not too late to establish one now.” As the amount of digital scanning increases, the repository would hold those paper remains as well. The cost of this salon des refusés would be a tithe of the total cost of copying.

The NEH requires many expensive things of its grantees — among them the storage of microfilm master negatives at low humidity and temperature (often in commercial storage vaults at a cost of a dollar per year per roll) and the creation of a second-generation negative from which to make positive “service copies” of film as needed — but the NEH never required, should so manifestly have required, should this instant begin requiring, that any microfilming or digital scanning that it pays for will without exception result in the physical storage somewhere (either in the host library or, if the host library was enticed into applying for the NEH grant partly to be rid of the incremental bulk of the book, in a low-cost book-refugee ziggurat) of every original “master-positive” book or bound newspaper.

Despite Tanselle’s influence, the basic outlook of the reformatters has not changed that much. Steve Dalton began his 1998 seminar at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, “To Film or to Scan,” with a paper-demonization demo. “Chemical deterioration takes place because paper has what we can call inherent vice. Inherent vice, I like to say, is the original sin of paper. It’s born to a goodness, with high ideals, to live a long and prosperous life. But it has this tendency to go wrong.” Dalton crumpled up a piece of blank, eighteenth-century rag stock and demonstrated that it could be flattened out again without damage. “It almost feels like a fabric, rather than a paper,” he said. While we students handed around the artifact, Dalton crisply summarized the decline in nineteenth-century papermaking — the bleaches, the sizings, the lignins, the tannins.

Then, from a shelf in his podium, he took out a small blue book in an old library binding, its serifed title stamped in gold. “This is a book from 1903,” he said, “and that paper that we passed around is from roughly 1785 or ’90.” He pulled out a page from the book, crumpled it in both hands, and let the manufactured confetti fall onto the wood-grain vinyl veneer of a conference table. “I think librarians secretly have the urge to do this once in a while,” Dalton volunteered; there was some light laughter. “So if you feel the urge, I’ll leave this book up here. But one page per person, please.” He repeated the old estimates from Robert Hayes: “So we’re talking probably over three hundred million volumes in research collections in the United States that have this terrible inherent vice to self-destruct.”

Soon we were hearing some blunt talk about a primary advantage to preservation microfilming. “A lot of times institutions that we deal with, when we do preservation planning surveys, are wrestling with significant storage problems,” Dalton said. “Does anyone here have a storage problem in your institution?” Hands went up around the room. “Space is really — it’s a big factor.” If you merely photocopy a brittle book in order to preserve it, you’ve done nothing to, as Dalton put it, “crunch space,” whereas with microfilm, “if you’re discarding materials after filming, then you can take a large volume of material, and crunch it into a one-hundred-foot roll of film.”

At break time, I asked Dalton if I could take a look at the brittle book. It was called The Life Radiant by Lilian Whiting (Little, Brown, and Co., 1903). On the copyright page were blue and pale-purple stamps identifying it as the property of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. On the inside cover, in red letters, was stamped:

MICROFILMED

Date Feb 07 1990

TOO POOR TO BIND

Every page I turned was legible; turning did no damage. On page 80, I read: “The demands of modern life absolutely require the development of some means of communication that shall obviate the necessity of the present laborious means of handwriting.” On page 82 was a quote from H. G. Wells on the discovery of the future. Pages 83 and 84 were gone, though — crumpled in workshops to demonstrate the urgent necessity of microfilm.

I asked Dalton where he had gotten the book; he gave me an odd look. Perhaps it occurred to him that I wasn’t a librarian. “Uh, this is just something that when people go around here from the center to yard sales and things, if they see something like this they scoop it up,” he said. He smiled: “Always on the lookout!” The New York Public Library owns only microfilm now for The Life Radiant; its catalog record lists the 1990 reformatting as sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I suppose it is possible that the New York Public Library’s book happened to find its way to a yard sale in the environs of Andover, Massachusetts. It’s more likely that Dalton’s own staff at the Northeast Document Conservation Center microfilmed the book, and that the NYPL didn’t want it back afterward.

At Dalton’s “School for Scanning” seminars (also brought to you by the Mellon Foundation and the NEH), librarians go to hear current thinking on embedded metadata, SGML tagging, lossless compression, TIFF formats, emulation, refreshment, and disbinding. Why disbinding? “To get a digital image that’s really well captured, it’s still best to disbind,” Dalton advised us.

How high, one wonders, was the national toll? How much destruction did we as a nation pay for? The National Endowment for the Humanities doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know. I asked George Farr whether the NEH ever kept track of the number of volumes that physically went back on the shelves after their contents entered the Paradiso of spools (though I didn’t put it that way), and whether the NEH required its grant recipients to provide any counts or percentages of physical books discarded or disbound as part of their project reports. “We have not done so” 1was Farr’s written reply. “NEH has never taken a position on the eventual disposition of brittle volumes that have been microfilmed to preserve their intellectual content. We believe that this is a decision that is more appropriate for the grantee libraries to make.”

The most confidently flourished post-microfilm discard percentage that I have come across was offered by Carla Montori, head of preservation at the University of Michigan, in a posting to the Preservation Administrators Discussion Group. Montori writes:

Analysis of 15 years

2

of disposition decisions [at Michigan] indicates that something less than 40 % of brittle originals are withdrawn after reformatting into or replacement by a stable format copy.

Michigan has a long-established microfilming program, begun by Verner Clapp’s close friend Frederick Wagman. Perhaps, I thought, this forty-percent figure would make a good conservative estimate?

I ran it by Ellen McCrady, editor of the Abbey Newsletter. She said she had no way of knowing, since libraries weren’t eager to make that sort of information public, but that it seemed on the low side. “I would guess that forty percent were saved whole,” she said. She told me to check the Association of Research Libraries’ annual preservation statistics, which might offer some clues. So I ordered a copy of the latest year then available, 1996–1997.