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

At some point, maybe not so long from now, a company such as Octavo may want to scan a volume of newspapers, at high resolution, nondestructively, as if it were a fragile sixteenth-century folio. The president of the company will make inquiries at a library or historical society in his city. He will be led into a room that holds four hundred gray cabinets of microfilm. “But we need the originals,” the company president will say. “Where are the originals?”

On September 29, 1999, President Clinton gave Patricia Battin a National Medal for the Humanities. “Patricia Battin is saving history,” Clinton said at the ceremony. “The high acidic content of paper threatens to destroy millions of old books, but she has led the national campaign to raise awareness about this challenge and preserve the genius of the past.” Clinton described Battin’s efforts to “transfer information from so-called ‘brittle books’ to microfilm and optical disks.” More than 770,000 books have “already been preserved,” Clinton said. He ended: “Thank you for saving the knowledge of the past for the children of tomorrow.”

Since Battin began campaigning for the cause in 1987, the National Endowment for the Humanities has given away more than $115 million to libraries for microfilming — seventy-some million dollars for books in addition to the forty-five million assigned to the participants in the U.S. Newspaper Program. “I think the NEH newspaper program is incredible,” Battin said to me. “We have access to resources that we would never have if they had been left alone. I think we will have the same with the Brittle Books Program.” The reason that the newspapers were thrown away after they were filmed, Battin explained to me, was that “they were crumbling during the process — I mean, they were breaking and everything during the process of filming them.”

No. Even if things did instantly crumble after their final farewell wave of photographic transubstantiation — and they don’t — that would explain only the discarding of those newspapers that were actually filmed, and not the practically universal dumpage of the same runs at other libraries. I suggested to her that microfilm also saves space.

“But I don’t think that saving space was the issue,” Battin remarkably replied. “Not ever in my experience. I would say we all went into microfilming with great reluctance.”

When Battin was head of Columbia’s libraries, one of her senior colleagues was Pamela Darling. Darling was a cheerfully unrepentant thrower-outer. “Think about space costs,” 1she argued in Microform Review: if a library was to replace half of its volumes with microfilm, “existing shelf space would last almost twice as long.” Darling advised readers of Library Journal to “keep re-examining 2your librarian’s hoarding instinct.” If you don’t really want something enough to pay for its repair, then

get rid of it! Give it to another library

if

it needs it and can care for it; sell it to a collector or dealer if there are enough pieces left to sell; or — horror of horrors — put it in the trash can.

If we don’t start throwing things out, Darling insisted, “the central stacks of all major libraries will soon be condemned as unsanitary landfill — the world’s intellectual garbage dumps.” Darling was the head of Columbia’s preservation department when she wrote these words. Later she was a special consultant 3for Peter Sparks’s National Preservation Program Office; the National Endowment for the Humanities paid her to develop training programs and a self-study manual 4for preservation planning.

Battin herself was of the opinion that it “may well be cheaper 5to support access than large real estate holdings and service personnel to house and manage rapidly growing collections of artifacts.” And yet to me she said, in the sincerest possible voice, “I don’t think it’s your librarians that have ever tried to miniaturize in order to save space. I think it hurt most of us as much as it did any scholar to have to make these decisions, but we had the responsibility.” Later, however, when I asked her directly why a given book couldn’t just resume its former place in a library’s collection after it was “preserved,” she said that “you have to look at the cost of maintaining this on the shelf.” Then she seemed to sense a self-contradiction; she said: “And in that regard, space does become a factor in making the decision. But it is not the factor that led one to microfilm in the first place. I think that’s very important, to make that distinction.”

I asked her about Thomas Tanselle’s proposal to store any post-preservational rejects in a publicly financed repository. “Tom has presented this to me in public meetings before,” Battin said. “And I don’t think the economics have been worked out.” (She and her colleagues managed to work out the economics of a hundred million dollars’ worth of microfilming; surely figuring out how to devote ten million dollars to the foundation of a national repository is not beyond their talents.) Tanselle, she said, “represents a fairly small group of scholars for whom this is a very passionate issue. I think the vast number of scholars would rather have the access that we were trying to provide.”

And what access is that? How has the Brittle Books Program furthered access to anything? In the case of newspapers on film, you can mail around the spools, which is a convenience, since the newspaper volumes themselves (if they haven’t been scrapped) must as a rule stay on site. But books are portable and parcel-postable. Columbia University, alone among world libraries, owns a microfilm copy of Francis de Croisset’s memoir of Robert de Flers, which it once owned in the original. I now own the original, because Pamela Darling, or someone at Columbia’s preservation department, gave it to Patricia Battin, who gave it to me. In 1985, everyone at Columbia had access to the original book; now I do. (Columbia can have the book back anytime.)

“Access,” as employed by practicing retrievalists, does not mean physical access. The ability to summon words from distant, normally unreachable sources, which can be a fine thing for scholarship, is being linked to the compulsory removal of local physical access, which is a terrible thing for scholarship. Battin wrote once that “the value, in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” No wonder scholars like Thomas Tanselle opposed her: she was determined to make it more difficult for them to do their work.

“We have differed from the very beginning,” Battin says of Tanselle. “It’s just an honest disagreement.”

Speaking of honesty, late in our conversation I asked Battin what the thinking was behind the idea that books were “turning to dust.”

She looked puzzled. “I guess I don’t understand,” she said. “They were. Are you thinking it’s hyperbole?”

I said I didn’t know quite what the phrase meant.

“Basically what we meant was they were crumbling,” Battin explained. “I think we used ‘crumbling.’ ‘Crumbling books’ was what I remember much more that we used rather than ‘turning to dust.’ ”

In 1995, in testimony offered to Congress on behalf of the Association of Research Libraries, the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the National Humanities Alliance, Battin said, without qualification, that before 1988 (that is, before “the massive salvation effort” of the full-scale brittle-books initiative) “millions of books 6were crumbling and turning to dust on shelves in libraries and archives…. Surveys confirmed that nearly 80 million books were threatened with such destruction.”