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

17. Neil MacKay: Neil MacKay, The Hole in the Card: The Story of the Microfilm Aperture Card (St. Paul: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, 1966), p. 5. See also Rubin, History of Micrographics, which quotes Langan’s own Notes on the Early History of Microfilm Aperture Cards; and Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 107.

18. Vernon D. Tate: See Rubin, History of Micrographics, pp. 57–58. In the thirties, as Herman Fussler wrote approvingly in Photographic Reproduction for Libraries, the National Archives, under Vernon Tate’s direction, filmed bulky governmental records, which “are then destroyed except for a small percentage (e.g., 10 per cent) kept to illustrate the original format. The saving in space thus obtained is very great.” Tate himself wrote: “Legislation was procured to enable the disposition under certain conditions of valuable records that have been microfilmed.” Vernon D. Tate, “Microphotography in Wartime,” Journal of Documentary Reproduction 5:3 (September 1942); 134–35.

19. “secret military weapon”: Tate, “Microphotography in Wartime.”

20. “We’re going places Verner”: Luther Evans to Verner Clapp, June 25, 1945, Clapp papers, Library of Congress.

21. narrowly missing the chieftaincy: Clapp probably missed being appointed librarian of Congress because a McCarthyite senator from Clapp’s home state of Maryland, John Marshall Butler, had it in for him, according to a fascinating paper by Betty Milum, “Eisenhower, ALA, and the Selection of L. Quincy Mumford,” Libraries and Culture 30:1 (winter 1995). Clapp gave permission for the Library of Congress to display (as part of a UNESCO exhibit entitled “The Library in a Free World”) one of Butler’s campaign photographs, in a display-panel entitled “Distortion of Information.” (It was a cut-and-paste job, produced in 1951 by Butler’s campaign office with the apparent aid of Joe McCarthy’s money and staff, showing Butler’s opponent, veteran senator and McCarthy opponent Millard Tydings, in what at a glance seemed to be close conference with Earl Browder, ex-head of the U.S. Communist Party.) Butler complained, and Clapp sent an apology and substituted a different composite photo from Time. But Butler wasn’t appeased, and he and/or McCarthy seems to have set the FBI to work gathering dirt on Clapp, whose 1953 FBI report mentions an informant’s letter from 1928 in which Clapp was said to have been arrested in 1922 in connection with some suspicious fires at Trinity College — this sounds like FBI smear-to-order work. By his own admission, however, Clapp had been detained in the twenties for “lurking in an alley.” He wrote in his application form for the CIA: “I commenced action for false arrest, but was assured by my lawyer that the record was erased.”

22. “Reduction in bulk”: Council on Library Resources, Meeting on the Problems of Microform in Libraries (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 1958). See also “Space Problems of Large (General) Research Libraries: Report of a Meeting,” College and Research Libraries, May 1959, p. 219, in which is mentioned, as a “deferred” suggestion, a “proposal for a ‘weeding authority,’ which would roam through large research libraries and, endowed with authority derived from joint sponsorship, would recommend consolidation of collections, transfers of materials to central storage warehouses, etc.” An institution designated as “University C” (Yale, probably; see pp. 88–89) was described as “meeting the storage problem” by cutting back on acquisitions and “working through its collections subject by subject so as to discard materials of less value, replace with microtext those materials for which this may be done effectively, and transfer to a compact storage collection those items which should be retained locally but which may be assigned to a location of inferior physical accessibility.” “University D” planned to “reduce to microtext a significant segment (covering one field of study) in the library of one of the professional schools of the University” in order to test its financial feasibility and its “effects on consumers and consumer-reaction.”

23. Minuteman missile: See “Contracts,” Missiles and Rockets, January 15, 1962. AVCO also had $5.7 million for the development of nose cones for the Titan and Atlas missiles.

24. “A Good Beginning”: Verner Clapp, “A Good Beginning,” in Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting and Convention (Washington, D.C.: National Microfilm Association, 1959), on microfiche. Vernon Tate was on the governing board of the National Microfilm Association that year, as were emissaries from Xerox Haloid and Bell Labs.

25. list of names: Verner Clapp, diary, November 4, 1951, Clapp papers, Library of Congress. Another who worked on the Library of Congress’s CIA projects was Burton W. Adkinson, Director of the Reference Department. Burton, a map expert and former OSS analyst, worked for the National Science Foundation from 1957 to 1971; in 1978, he wrote Two Centuries of Federal Information, a book about the history of information science in the federal government that manages to edit the CIA out almost completely. One of the CIA projects mentioned in Clapp’s notes was the “Mo. Russ. Acc. List”—the Monthly List of Russian Accessions, begun in 1951.

26. Cold War mania: The CIA’s “Intellofax” aperture-card system was described in 1961: “The classified documents are received from scores of different major sources….Since 1954 we have been miniaturizing the documents by microphotography and mounting them in apertures on IBM punched cards. Access to the document itself is indirect, through codes punched into the cards to indicate subject, area, source, security classification, date and number of each document.” Senate Committee on Government Operations, Documentation, Indexing, and Retrieval of Scientific Information, 86th Cong. 2d sess., Document no. 113 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 63–64; quoted in Robert M. Hayes and Joseph Becker, Information Storage and Retrieval: Tools, Elements, Theories (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 168.

27. BEST COPY AVAILABLE: The CIA’s cover letter to me says: “We apologize for the poor quality of these pages, but there are no better copies available.” According to C. P. Auger, other formulas are: “Reproduced from the best available copy” and “Copy available does not permit fully legible reproduction” and “This document has been reproduced from the best available copy furnished by the sponsoring agency. Although it is recognized that certain portions are illegible, it is being released in the interest of making available as much information as possible.” C. P. Auger, “The Importance of Microforms,” Microform Review 20:4 (fall 1991), reprinted from Information Sources in Grey Literature, 2d ed. (New York: Bowker-Saur, 1989).

28. AMERICA’S SPACE PROGRAM: Microform Review 5:3 (July 1976). Another Xerox/UMI ad, which ran in the January 1975 issue (4:1) of Microform Review, is headlined “The Beast and the Librarian.” It tells the story of a librarian who adopted a serials collection that began to multiply and turned into “seemingly uncontrollable beasts”: “As the swelling menagerie usurped more space, the librarian realized how many thousands of dollars the animals devoured — just sitting on the shelves….The librarian was in distress, about to be swallowed up by the paper monster, when who should come to the rescue but MIGHTY MICROFILM!” In 1984, University Microfilms produced an ad headlined space invaders: “Nobody knows where they came from. But suddenly, they were everywhere. In the stacks. In the aisles. And now, even advancing on the lobby” ( Microform Review 13:4 [spring 1984]). Eugene Power, founder of University Microfilms, sold the company to Xerox in 1962; in 1983, Xerox bought Microfilm Corporation of America from The New York Times and merged it with UMI; and then in 1985, Bell and Howell bought UMI from Xerox and in 1999 renamed it Bell and Howell Information and Learning. See Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”