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

27. Horace Greeley: Greeley was an active member of the American Institute; he became its president in 1866. John Campbell, a paper merchant a few doors down from Dr. Deck on Nassau Street, was also a member of the Institute in 1855. I found them listed in a scarce pamphlet owned by Columbia University: Catalogue of the Life and Annual Members of the American Institute of the City of New York (New York: New York Printing Co., 1868).

28. Richard Hoe: Hoe’s specialty was high-speed presses. Without plentiful, cheap paper, publishers would be less likely to convert to faster equipment; I speculate that Hoe may have had an interest in Deck’s proposal for that reason. Hoe had served on the committee in 1852 that organized the Institute’s popular fair at Castle Garden (now Battery Park), where novelties of science and engineering were awarded prizes. Morse’s telegraph was first displayed at the 1842 fair; Walt Whitman delivered a “Song of the Exposition” to open the 1871 fair, announcing that America would build a cathedral of sacred industry that was “mightier than Egypt’s tombs.”

29. whiskey blenders: Nicolas Barker is the source of this image.

30. Hall and McChesney: Hendrix TenEyck, an executive of Hall and McChesney, was president of the American Microfilm Association when Verner Clapp gave his keynote address in 1959.

CHAPTER 7 — Already Worthless

1. “A Life-Cycle Cost Analysis”: William Richard Lemberg, Ph.D. diss., School of Library and Information Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1995, www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/publications/DigtlDoc.pdf. Michael Buckland, Lemberg’s thesis supervisor at Berkeley, writes that “one of the principal expected benefits of the move from paper-based to digital libraries is in the massive cost-savings expected to result from an expected reduction in duplication.” Michael Buckland, “Searching Multiple Digital Libraries: A Design Analysis” (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/oasis/multisrch.htm (viewed August 13, 2000).

2. “the most valuable fibre”: Munsell, Chronology. Munsell is at first unfamiliar with esparto grass, calling it “spartum,” “Exparto,” and “waterbroom”—he attributes its initial use to a Parisian stationer named Jean A. Farina, in 1852. The material “at first encountered great opposition both from proprietors and their workmen, but finally assumed vast importance as a raw material” (p. 124). In 1866, Lloyd’s Newspaper imported two hundred and sixty tons of esparto grass to London (p. 200); in 1870, there was an esparto shortage, and the price more than doubled (p. 213); in 1871, Lloyd, the newspaper publisher, owned 180,000 acres in Algeria, on which he raised his own esparto crop (p. 221); in 1872, English esparto imports had passed 130,000 tons, and Munsell writes that the Times “was printed on paper made more or less of this material, as was that of most of the other leading journals, periodicals and current publications generally” (p. 226). In its article “Paper,” the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica has a large and handsome engraving of the “Sinclair Esparto Boiler,” featuring recirculative “vomiting pipes,” and no pictures of wood-pulping equipment. See also British Paper and Board Makers’ Association, Paper Making: A General Account of Its History, Processes, and Applications (Kenley, Eng., 1950), pp. 31, 47, 101. The turn-of-the-century English book, then, is likely to have little or no wood pulp in it; American paper and English paper have different compositions and are likely to age differently.

3. Lesk: Michael Lesk, Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1997). Lemberg’s dissertation gets a paragraph on pp. 76–77.

4. “very high performance Backbone Network Service”: E.g., a 1999 National Science Foundation grant of $422,000 to Harvard for a “High-Performance Internet Connection” connecting Harvard to NYNEX and the NSF’s vBNS, in order to support scientific projects and “Digital Library Applications.” Of course Harvard should have high-speed Internet connections, if it needs them, but the federal government shouldn’t be paying for them, and the money shouldn’t come bundled in a plan to destroy traditional libraries.

5. routinely prepare for digitization: At a 1998 conference sponsored by the Research Libraries Group and Great Britain’s National Preservation Office, John E. McIntyre, head of preservation of the National Library of Scotland, discussed the results of an informal survey of digitization practices in a paper called “Protecting the Physical Form.” He wrote: “Returns from the Preparation Group’s questionnaire suggest that disbinding in order to scan a volume is common, in most cases so that a flat bed scanner can be used.” John E. McIntyre, “Protecting the Physical Form,” in Guidelines for Digital Imaging, Joint RLG and NPO Preservation Conference, 1998, www.rlg.org/preserv/joint/mcintyre.htm.

6. “knowing that the original will be disbound”: Carla Montori, “Re: electronic/paper format & weeding,” PADG (Preservation Administrators Discussion Group), December 15, 1997, archived on the CoOL (Conservation OnLine) website, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/12/msg00011.htm (viewed September 29, 2000).

7. Making of America: Michigan’s Making of America books are to be found at moa.umdl.umich.edu.

8. “It is substantially cheaper”: Michael Lesk, “Substituting Images for Books: The Economics for Libraries,” Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (symposium), Las Vegas, April 1996, www.lesk.com/mlesk/unlv/unlv.htm (viewed September 19, 2000).

9. “avaricious in [their] consumption”: William G. Bowen, “JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Communication,” the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, October 4, 1995, www.mellon.org/jsesc.htm. JSTOR’s webpage background document states that the “basic idea” behind Bowen’s JSTOR “was to convert the back issues of paper journals into electronic formats that would allow savings in space (and in capital costs associated with that space) while simultaneously improving access to the journal content.” JSTOR, Background, www.umich.edu./~jstor/about/background.htm (1996) (viewed September 15, 2000). A recent JSTOR brochure entitled “Electronic Archives of Core Mathematics Journals” says: “By making the complete runs of important journal backfiles available and searchable over the World Wide Web, JSTOR not only provides new research possibilities, it also helps librarians reduce longterm costs associated with storing these materials.”

10. survey conducted by JSTOR: JSTOR, Bound Volume Survey, April 3, 2000, www.jstor.org/about/bvs.htm (viewed September 19, 2000).

11. “modem life”: “The third class of tendencies is easily identifiable with those impulses to disinterested benevolence which are so prominent in modern [OCR’d as modem] life.” Henry Rutgers Marshall, “Emotions versus Pleasure-Pain,” Mind, n.s. 4:14. (April 1895): 180–94. I also got multiple hits for “modemist” and “modemism,” none having to do with data-communications.

CHAPTER 8 — A Chance to Begin Again

1. “application of the camera”: Raney, “Introduction,” in Microphotography for Libraries, p. v.

2. “a couple of curious librarians”: M. Llewellyn Raney, “A Capital Truancy,” The Journal of Documentary Reproduction 3:2 (June 1940). Possibly Keyes Metcalf was there, and the scout was probably from the Rockefeller Foundation; Charles Z. Case of Recordak helped out with the cost analysis.

3. “Every research library would”: Fremont Rider (writing anonymously), “Microtext in the Management of Book Collections: A Symposium,” College and Research Libraries, July 1953, reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 206. Rider presented this proposal anonymously here, but in other settings he repeated it almost word for word under his own name.