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

44. “Microfilming came at a propitious time”: Charles G. La Hood, Jr., “Microfilm for the Library of Congress,” College and Research Libraries, July 1973. La Hood writes: “Normally, the Library requires the supplier [of newspaper microfilm] to furnish sample rolls of each file for quality-control testing before ordering, so that the pulp files are not destroyed prematurely.”

45. “crisis of space”: Library of Congress, Working Group on Reference and Research, Report to the Task Group on Shelving Arrangement (July 8, 1997, updated October 30, 1997), p. 2.

46. James Billington: At the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, a quasi-professorial group under the direction of historian Sherman Kent, Billington wrote research reports, known as intelligence estimates, for President Eisenhower and other advisers. Richard Nixon, who as vice president paid close attention to intelligence briefings, became an admirer: “James Billington is, of course — you mention intellectuals. Now, there’s an intellectual — just to show you I have an open mind — who everybody ought to know better. He has a first-class geopolitical mind. He particularly is expert in Soviet affairs. I’d like to see him sometime — I‘d like to see him ambassador to Russia. I think he would be a great ambassador” (Richard Nixon interview with Brian Lamb, part 2, Booknotes, C-SPAN, March 1, 1992). In 1956, while the CIA’s MKULTRA drug experiments on unwitting Canadians were in full swing (formally approved by Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953), and not so long after the CIA’s 1954 paramilitary invasion of Guatemala (micro-managed by Dulles), James Billington toured the intelligence capitals of the world as Dulles’s personal assistant. See Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), pp. 393, 429; and James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999), pp. 489–92. Dulles had “this ability to make quite cold-blooded assessments while remaining warm and gracious that was quite remarkable,” Billington told Srodes. “People talk about the Cold War frenzy, but I admit I slept better after that trip knowing that some of these plans never got off the ground.” The Library of Congress doesn’t make too much of Billington’s CIA years now; a website biography of him skips past that time: “A graduate of Princeton University, he attended Oxford University’s Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate in history. At Harvard University from 1957 to 1962, he taught history and was a research fellow at the Russian Research Center” (Library of Congress, “James H. Billington,” www.loc.gov/bicentennial/bios_billington.htm). But as late as 1959, while he was employed by Harvard’s Russian Research Center, Billington apparently still had a consulting relationship of some kind with the agency: he wrote a CIA memorandum entitled “Sino-Soviet Relationship,” dated September 18, 1959; it is footnoted in a paper published in the CIA’s in-house historical journal, Studies in Intelligence. See Harold P. Ford, “The CIA and Double Demonology,” Studies in Intelligence, winter 1998–1999, www.odci.gov/csi/studies/winter98–99/art05.htm (viewed August 22, 2000). For the relationship between the CIA and Harvard’s Russian Research Center, see Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

CHAPTER 4 — It Can Be Brutal

1. Richmond, Virginia, Daily Dispatch: The yellow address label reads:

A R Spofford 12mch80

Librarian of Congress

2. what looks to be a butcher’s apron: Gene Gurney and Nick Apple, The Library of Congress: A Picture Story of the World’s Largest Library (New York: Crown, 1981), p. 113.

3. Joseph Mitchell: See Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 139.

4. “The anarchist”: New York World-Telegram, February 2, 1934, p. 1.

5. “people rarely browse”: E. E. Duncan, “Microfiche Collections for the New York Times/Information Bank,” Microform Review, October 1973.

6. “blind as lovers”: Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 440.

7. the research was subsidized: Bourdon W. Scribner, “Summary Report of Research at the National Bureau of Standards on Materials for the Reproduction of Records,” in Transactions, International Federation for Documentation, vol. 1, fourteenth conference (Oxford, 1938).

8. “cellulose acetate motion-picture film”: John R. Hill and Charles G. Weber, “Stability of Motion-Picture Films as Determined by Accelerated Aging,” Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards 17 (December 1936).

9. “in the same category of permanence”: Quoted in Kuhlman, “Are We Ready to Preserve Newspapers on Films?” in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 385.

10. shrink, buckle, bubble: See Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.” Bourke writes: “Libraries with extensive collections of older silver gelatin and diazo microforms should realize that much of this may be at risk.” According to Preservation Resources, a top-of-the-line modern microfilming company, “the only solution is reduplication onto polyester films before the acetate film becomes so deteriorated that it compromises the legibility of the film image. If left for too long, even duplication becomes impossible.” Preservation Resources, “Preserving Microfilm,” www.oclc.org/oclc/promo/presres/9138.htm (viewed September 13, 2000).

11. “dreaded vinegar syndrome”: Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.”

12. by the mid-eighties: “NYPL did not abandon the use of cellulose acetate until about 1983 with the inception of the Research Libraries Group Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project, which mandated the use of polyester base for all silver gelatin film made by the participants in the project.” Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.”

13. Corona spy satellites: “One serious problem was unanticipated breakage of the acetate film,” according to F. Dow Smith, but “new polyester-based film from Eastman Kodak increased the reliability considerably.” F. Dow Smith, “The Design and Engineering of Corona’s Optics,” in Corona: Between the Sun and the Earth, ed. Robert A. McDonald (Bethesda, Md.: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1997). In an article about the Corona project, Seth Shulman writes: “Help finally arrived when a research team at Eastman Kodak discovered how to adhere emulsion to a polyester-based film, which proved much more durable under harsh conditions.” Seth Shulman, “Code Name Corona,” Technology Review, October 1996.

14. Millions of rolls of acetate images: It wasn’t cheap to produce that acetate: “From 1952 through 1966, the Library spent well over $1,000,000 putting 150,000 brittle books on microfilm.” John P. Baker, “Preservation Programs of the New York Public Library. Part Two: From the 1930s to the ‘60s,” Microform Review 11:1 (winter 1982). Bourke sums up the New York Public Library’s predicament: “The physical condition of many reels of silver gelatin film on cellulose actate base at NYPL is not good.” Bourke, “Curse of Acetate.”

15. strange spots: Lawson B. Knott, Jr., “Aging Blemishes on Microfilm Negatives,” General Services Administration Circular, no. 326, January 21, 1964. See also Ellen McCrady, “The History of Microfilm Blemishes,” Restaurator 6 (1984). McCrady observes that microfilm’s fineness of grain causes problems: “Silver, normally a stable material, becomes more reactive when finely divided. As a result, silver halide microfilm is more strongly affected by processing, humidity and various oxidizing gases and contaminants than many other types of film.”