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

24. “disenchanted” electrician: There were, he said, “too many people giving orders without following normal procedures.” NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 91. “Before the December 5 fire,” the electrician “had not known that DEZ could explode” (p. 92).

25. a substantial volume: “After the December 5, 1985 fire, it was general knowledge that DEZ was in the system,” according to one interviewee. NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 95.

26. “black goop”: NASA, Accident Investigation, pp. 9, 110.

27. copper elbow pipe: NASA, Accident Investigation, pp. 11, 93.

28. too hot to touch: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 109.

29. Northrup did not inform NASA: NASA, Accident Investigation, pp. 25–26.

30. “the walls were blown apart”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 14.

31. “The violence of the explosion”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 36.

32. there were no relief valves: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 28.

33. “We’re going to blow it”: Welsh, phone interview, March 25, 2000.

34. armored vehicles: Welsh, phone interview, March 25, 2000.

35. “vast and unprecedented cuts”: Library of Congress, “The Librarian of Congress Testifies Before Appropriations Subcommittee,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:9 (March 3, 1986).

36. “disassembled by means of shaped”: NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 16.

37. whoomp: Phone interview with an eyewitness who does not want to be named, April 2000.

38. “there has never been an important”: Boorstin also formally said good-bye to the members of the house subcommittee during that meeting; he was retiring from the Library of Congress. Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, Hearings, p. 394.

39. rats: “The study will expose rats to acute, subchronic, and chronic inhalation of zinc oxide particles at various concentrations in air….An examination of sperm morphology and vaginal cytology will also be performed on specimens in the sub-chronic and chronic studies. Some specimens from the sub-chronic exposures will be mated to study the reproductive and teratogenic effects.” U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 79. The cost of the rat study, performed by the Battelle Memorial Institute, is given on p. 18.

40. The tests were “inconclusive”: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 77. In another test, DEZ-treated paper was applied to the skin of guinea pigs and the eyes of rabbits.

41. optical-disk program: See, for example, William J. Welsh, “The Preservation Challenge,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program. “In the area of preservation research, the Library of Congress is currently engaged in two promising projects of enormous potential value,” Welsh writes, both of which apply “ultra-high technology to preservation”: diethyl zinc and optical disk.

42. “On Friday, February 21”: Library of Congress, “Engineering Problems Experienced at Deacidification Test Facility,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:11 (March 17, 1986).

43. “The Library’s own review”: Library of Congress, “Library’s Book Deacidification Program.” The DEZ technique “is a viable process that can be implemented and handled safely,” according to the article.

44. “didn’t have the chemical processing experience”: Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations, Hearings, p. 435.

45. “Dump DEZ”: Karl Nyren, “It’s Time to Dump DEZ,” Library Journal, September 15, 1986.

46. “danger and unmanageability of DEZ”: Karl Nyren, “DEZ Process.”

47. Welsh published a rebuttal: William J. Welsh, “In Defense of DEZ: LC’s Perspective,” Library Journal, January 1987.

48. when it does use DEZ: Scott Eidt told me: “Diethyl zinc wasn’t used a great deal as a Ziegler-Natta catalyst. It was used, as far I remember, and is still used, in dilute hydrocarbon solution, to scavenge out water from the polymerization process — that is, it would react with the water in the solvent and knock it out.” Book Preservation Technologies also resorts to vague language, perhaps in order to avoid mentioning the military uses: “Metal alkyls have been used for many years in a variety of applications. Their major use today is as an intermediate in the manufacturing of polyethylene and polypropylene” (p. 28).

49. neat and by the ton: “During the course of a year, Texas Alkyls will be trucking 15 to 20, 430-gallon tanks of neat liquid DEZ from their facility in Houston to the full-scale plant site,” U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 71. Stauffer Chemical wrote a letter to the Library of Congress dated April 18, 1985, in which it observed that the rate of gas generation is two orders of magnitude greater for neat diethyl zinc than for DEZ diluted fifty-fifty with a solvent. The letter is paraphrased in NASA, Accident Investigation, p. 144. The gas, mainly ethane, is flammable.

50. “DEZ is produced”: Welsh, “In Defense of DEZ.”

51. “DEZ is and always will be”: Koski added, “The cylinder that DEZ is stored in is labelled as pyrophoric but these cylinders are not perpetually in flame either, although [their contents] certainly would be if the valve was cracked open.”

52. $2.8 million: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 18.

53. “I think the safety questions”: Boyce Rensenberger, “Acid Test: Stalling Self-Destruction in the Stacks,” The Washington Post, August 29, 1988, p. A13, final edition, microfilm.

54. “were so startling”: Robert J. Milevski, “Mass Deacidification: Effects of Treatment on Library Materials Deacidified by the DEZ and MG-3 Processes,” in The 1992 Book and Paper Group Annual, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Conservation, 1992). Milevski became the preservation librarian at Princeton in 1992.

55. one-hundred-million-dollar twenty-year contracts: Rensenberger, “Acid Test.”

56. thirty thousand books a week: Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 111.

57. “And if you know Billington”: Billington’s occasional outbursts are described in Linton Weeks, “In a Stack of Troubles: The Librarian of Congress Has Raised Funds. And His Voice. And a Lot of Eyebrows,” The Washington Post, December 27, 1995, p. F1, Nexis. “In August 1995, Billington learned that the U.S. attorney had written him a letter expressing concern about the way book damage was being reported. Someone on the library staff had answered the letter. ‘Unsatisfactorily, and in my name,’ says Billington. ‘He went hysteric,’ says one library official who asked not to be named. Billington remembers that he threw something. He says it may have been a book.”

58. Alphamat: Nielsen Bainbridge, Alphamat Artcare, www.nielsen-bainbridge.com/bainbridge/html/sparks_testimonial.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).

59. “strategic information reserve”: Testimony of James Billington, April 19, 1994, before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities. Billington disseminated several variations of this speech.

60. “substituting technology for paper”: James Billington, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, June 15, 1992, excerpted in Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter, September 1992. In 1999, Billington told Congress that one of the library’s “key current overriding initiatives” is “providing massive digital access to information and, at the same time, streamlining and re-engineering our handling of access to books and other traditional containers of knowledge.” Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 106th Cong., 1st sess., 1999, p. 120.