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

57. gruff and likeable: For an account of Louis Wright’s increasing doubts about the activities of the Council, see Deanna B. Marcum, “Reclaiming the Research Library: The Founding of the Council on Library Resources,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996). Marcum confirmed Wright’s doubts about Clapp in a phone interview.

58. “the most informed point of contact”: Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader,” p. 93.

59. “first library millionaire”: Paul Wasserman, “Interview with Paul Wasserman Regarding the Early History of CLIS,” Esther Herman (interviewer), January 11, 1995, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, www.clis.umd.edu/faculty/wasserman/pwinterview.htm. In 1947, at the Library of Congress, Mortimer Taube was put in charge of a project paid for by the Office of Naval Research to index and abstract scientific research and reports of interest to Navy weapons designers; see Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information, p. 149. Robert M. Hayes, former dean of the UCLA’s School of Library and Information Science, wrote me that Taube was “among the librarians who helped the CIA.” Having come up with his improved “Uniterm” method of indexing, Taube formed Documentation, Inc., and “received funding from the intelligence community, CIA included, to carry out the development of a variety of retrieval techniques based on that concept.” Robert Hayes, e-mail to author, 29 August 2000.

60. didn’t work either: In 1967, the annual report mentioned the Council’s “continued but unsuccessful attempts to develop a hand-held portable inexpensive device for viewing microforms.” Having no luck with hand-helds, the Council proceeded to commission the Taylor-Merchant Corporation to build a prototype projector for microfiche and microfilm, whose “portability and economy should prove attractive to graduate students and others.” The microform projector never made it to market. Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 28.

61. a conduit for CIA money: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment (New York: Bantam, 1967), p. 137; and Sol Stern, “A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with particular reference to the NSA, CIA, etc.,” Ramparts, March 1967. The sponsorship of the Independence Foundation is recorded on the title page of Carl F. J. Overhage and R. Joyce Harman, eds., Intrex: Report of a Planning Conference on Information Transfer Experiments (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

62. “better and more economical systems for weeding”: Overhage and Harman, Intrex, p. 14.

63. “digital storage of encoded full-text”: Also “transmission of a scanned-image electrical signal over a communication network and display and/or reproduction in full size or microform for temporary and/or permanent retention by the user.” Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 15.

64. “Project INTREX fell very short”: Colin Burke, “Librarians Go High-Tech, Perhaps: The Ford Foundation, the CLR, and INTREX,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996).

65. traditionalist members of his board: Besides Louis Wright, there was Lyman Butterfield, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, editor of the Adams papers. But the scientists dominated: in addition to Caryl Haskins, Philip Morse, and Warren Weaver, there was Joseph C. Morris, a large cigar-smoking physicist from Tulane who had worked on submarine warfare and then on the Manhattan Project (where he got a radiation burn on one hand), described in a eulogy as “a notorious gadgeteer” and an “inveterate dial-twiddler” (College of Arts and Sciences, Tulane University, “Resolution on the Death of Professor Morris,” Meeting Minutes, May 19, 1970, Tulane University Archives). And there was James S. Coles, president of Bowdoin College, where he built tall buildings and raised huge sums. Coles, a chemist, spent the war at the Underwater Explosives Research Laboratory at Wood’s Hole; there, according to The Boston Globe (June 14, 1996, p. 49), he “conducted research to improve [the] underwater ignition and explosive power of depth charges, depth bombs, and torpedo warheads.” He joined the Council’s board in 1960.

66. “rescued many millions of pages”: Council on Library Resources, Second Annual Report (1958), pp. 25–26.

67. “the destruction of the text”: Alan B. Pritsker and J. William Sadler, “An Evaluation of Microfilm as a Method of Book Storage,” College and Research Libraries 18:4 (July 1957).

68. Crerar Library: Research Information Service, John Crerar Library, Dissemination of Information for Scientific Research and Development (Chicago: John Crerar Library, 1954).

69. The library was moving: See Council on Library Resources, Seventh Annual Report (1963), p. 24; and Edward J. Forbes and David P. Waite, Costs and Material Handling Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals, Lexington, Massachusetts: Forbes & Waite, 1961, held by the University of Michigan Libraries.

70. “Costs and Material Handling”: The consultants were Forbes and Waite, who specialized, wrote Clapp vaguely, in “information systems design including photographic applications,” for which imprecision one should perhaps substitute “defense and/or intelligence workers”; Clapp, normally a scrupulous bibliographer, doesn’t supply the full names of the consultants in the annual report for several years — an indication of some concern over secrecy. Edward J. Forbes and David P. Waite, Costs and Material Handling Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals (Lexington, Mass.: Forbes and Waite, 1961), held by the University of Michigan Libraries; Verner Clapp and Robert T. Jordan, “Re-evaluation of Microfilm as a Method of Book Storage,” College and Research Libraries, January 1963. Forbes and Waite write that the volumes under consideration are a collection of “older periodical issues (prior to 1920).”

71. “considerable labor saving”: Clapp and Jordan, “Re-evaluation.”

72. “except that of destruction”: Clapp and Jordan, “Re-evaluation.”

CHAPTER 10 — The Preservation Microfilming Office

1. twenty-four microfilm cameras: La Hood, “Microfilm for the Library of Congress.”

2. “otherwise beyond redemption”: Council on Library Resources, Twelfth Annual Report (1968), p. 28. See also Library of Congress, “National Preservation Program — First Phase,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 26:4 (January 26, 1967): “In its own preservation program, the Library of Congress has been segregating its brittle books for several years and microfilming thousands of publications too brittle to bind.”

3. “Space was a key word”: Library of Congress, “Administrative Department.”

4. “arrangements for assuring the preservation”: Council on Library Resources, Eleventh Annual Report (1967), p. 34. See also Norman J. Shaffer, “Library of Congress Pilot Preservation Project,” College and Research Libraries, January 1969. Shaffer writes that the Library of Congress preferred to microfilm nonfiction, rather than fiction, since scholars interested in fiction “would probably want to use the physical volumes.”

5. “safely discard”: Gordon Williams, The Preservation of Deteriorating Books: An Examination of the Problem with Recommendations for a Solution, report of the ARL Committee on the Preservation of Research Library Materials, September 1964, p. 17. In Library Journal, Williams compellingly wrote that “it will cost only about $2 more per volume to preserve the original for an indefinitely long future time and make a microfilm copy of it only when the book needs to be used, than it will cost to microfilm the original now and discard the original completely.” But Williams also condoned heavy discarding: “It is not necessary that more than one example of most deteriorating books be preserved” if “another example is being preserved” and a “usable copy of the text is cheaply and readily available.” Gordon Williams, “The Preservation of Deteriorating Books,” Library Journal, January 1, 1966.