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

You can learn all kinds of things from this staple-bound purple booklet. 3Harvard got $1.3 million in outside preservation money (a good chunk of it from the NEH); Boston Public Library got $3,522. Michigan digitized 1,350 “bound volumes” (they were no longer bound by the time they were digitized), and microfilmed 5,547. You can check how many volumes were deacidified, filmed, scanned, commercially bound, boxed, and treated to three different intensities of physical repair at each of over a hundred really big U.S. and Canadian libraries. Since 1988, according to these figures, which for technical reasons under-report actual levels, libraries microfilmed about one million volumes, most of the work paid for by the federal government. But you will not find in this purple book of preservation statistics — perhaps because the Association of Research Libraries is too tactful to demand it of its members — how many volumes were in fact preserved, in the old-fashioned sense.

I asked Julia Blixrud, one of the people who compiled the numbers, whether there had ever been an attempt to track how many books survived reformatting. She said she didn’t think so. Was that possibly, I said, because it would be embarrassing to poll members for such a statistic? “That I don’t know, I’ve not been a preservation librarian,” Blixrud said. “I would guess that it was not as much of interest to us.” And she added, “The political nature of this survey has been to assist in some ways in getting funds to continue to do the preservation microfilming.” She told me to talk to Jutta Reed-Scott, who with Harvard’s Jan Merrill-Oldham designed the survey in the late eighties.

“That unfortunately is a figure we did not collect,” said Reed-Scott. “I am not aware that anyone collected that. It would be a really difficult figure to keep track of. There are so many variables that go into returning items to the shelf.” (Oh, piffle. It would be no more difficult to track this figure than to track any other.) I asked Reed-Scott if the need for such a number had ever come up during the planning stage. “I do not recall that that ever arose as a question,” she said. I told her that my sense from talking to people was that there had been a sudden drop-off in preservational disbinds and discards around 1993. (The year, incidentally, of Thomas Tanselle’s book-burning piece.) “I think that’s exactly what happened,” Reed-Scott said. Now the problem was scanning. “That is the arena where the issue will become much more difficult than the preservation-microfilming arena,” she said. “You can film from a bound volume, with some difficulty, but it is certainly possible. It becomes far more difficult to scan from a bound volume, because obviously you get the distortion, if the margin is narrow.” In the evolution of scanning theory and praxis, we’re about where we were in 1953 in microfilm.

There is a further fact to note about Jutta Reed-Scott. In the seventies, she was not a preservationist at all; she was a hard-core space freer-upper. In 1976, as Jutta Reed, then collections development librarian at MIT, she published a wonderfully cut-and-dried paper for Microform Review arguing that if you subscribed to the microfilm of the journal Daedalus, for example, and dumped all but current paper issues, you would save $1.35 per year in binding costs. Add to that the “dramatic reduction 4of storage costs of micropublications over hard copy periodicals,” as determined by the formulas 5

storage cost = ½ av ( t ( t +1))

and

storage cost = ½ bv ( t ( t +1))

(where a is the yearly cost of storing one bound volume, and b is the yearly cost of storing one volume copied onto microfilm; where t is the storage time in years, and v is the number of volumes per year), and you really begin to save, save, save. Assuming an annual storage cost of $0.38 per journal volume and $0.034 for microfilm, our soi-disant preservationist calculates that if you replaced bound volumes of Scientific American with microcopies, you would over a twenty-year period save over $145 6 in storage costs. (Of course, you will no longer be able to interpret Scientific American ’s color-keyed illustrations properly, and over that same period you’ll have paid University Microfilms a fortune for the microfilm subscription.) “In the long run microforms will increase the storage capacity of present library buildings and can postpone the construction of additional storage space,” Jutta Reed unwaveringly writes.

Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, then, that Reed-Scott exhibited an indifference, a listless lack of curiosity, as to how many original volumes were saved after they were microfilmed, since in an earlier life she believed in the “decisive economic advantage” of the dump-and-replace method without any consideration of embrittlement whatsoever.

The NEH didn’t know and didn’t care; the national preservation statistics were mute on the subject; but still I kept an eye out for estimates and demi-disclosures, because I believe we need to know how much was lost. In 1984, David Stam, then director of the New York Public Library, wrote that “a heavy proportion 1of our embrittled material has been discarded after microfilming” (by “our” he meant in the United States), and he said that “the practice of disposal has often included materials that could have been adequately preserved in the original.” There is, however, no way to quantify the words “heavy proportion”—does it mean over half? I called Yale’s Paul Conway back and asked him whether a fifty-percent discard figure was a reasonable guess through 1993 or so. He said that “fifty percent rings true” for the years between 1983 to 1993. “But since then libraries are trying a lot harder.”

Gary Frost, who was for years in the business of making sumptuous preservation photocopies (sometimes with color-copied title pages) at a place in Texas called Booklab, wrote in 1998:

If the current compulsion toward digital scanning of library materials is really the dawning of a New Age era of microfilming what is the preservation implication? The implication may be the same; that the new technology will be considered a preservation method that results in the discard of library materials. The microfilming process, by one estimate, has resulted in the discard of over 60 % of the originals recorded.

Over sixty percent? Was that a reasonable estimate? Gary Frost is an interestingly ambivalent — one almost wants to say “tortured”—soul. He strongly believes that librarians should continue to function as custodians of the “source original.” Conservators should “support developments in storage facilities and delivery systems that enable the survival of originals.” He told me that Michael Lesk’s and Brother Lemberg’s idea of discarding millions of books in favor of networked digital page-scans is “a right-wing paramilitary objective — or no, a left-wing paramilitary objective.” He regrets the “very strong undercurrent in the USA toward disposability, toward favoring clean copy over soiled original.”

But in producing Booklab’s fabled preservation photocopies, Frost’s team of operators severed spines just as microfilmers would, to get pages to lie flat. Frost gave his mutilés de guerre a nice name, though: he called them leaf masters. Libraries were supposed to put their pristine, acid-free Booklab photocopies on the shelf and store the soiled leaf masters in cool sanctums, using them like the frozen sperm from great racehorses whenever the circulating photocopy had done too many laps. Originals were not for “eye reading,” but for “machine reading”—for the infinite propagation of copies. (“I’ve never seen a book I couldn’t copy,” Frost said, when I asked about the extent of crumblement or dusthood.) Not so many libraries were interested in storing boxed or shrink-wrapped bundles of loose pages, though; the leaf masters often went in the compost pile.