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

61. Bhabha Atomic Research Center: See the capsule biography accompanying Chandru Shahani and William K. Wilson, “Preservation of Libraries and Archives,” American Scientist, May — June 1987. Bhabha scientists began work on India’s nuclear bomb in 1971, according to Nicholas Berry of the Center for Defense Information (e-mail to author). See also Center for Defense Information, “Building the Indian Bomb,” May 19, 1998, www.cdi.org/issues/testing/inbombfct.htm (viewed August 14, 2000).

62. “pathetically poor engineering”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate (October 1994), lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm.

63. If in fifty years: Jana Kolar notes that “while most treated papers degrade less rapidly, some results of accelerated ageing experiments show an increased degradation of papers whose pH has been changed from the acidic to the alkaline region using deacidification treatment.” Accelerated-aging experiments can, however, supply only directional hints. Jana Kolar, “Mechanism of Autoxidative Degradation of Cellulose,” Restaurator 18 (1997).

CHAPTER 14 — Bursting at the Seams

1. costs were bundled: Between 1984 and 1994, the Library of Congress spent $5.7 million of the $11.5 million congressional appropriation for the construction of a diethyl-zinc facility, according to General Accounting Office, Financial Statement Audit for the Library of Congress for Fiscal Year 1995. Although they are difficult to document, the overhead costs attributable to diethyl-zinc research and development must be added to that amount.

2. Landover: Library of Congress, Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:22 (May 28, 1976).

3. long-frozen Everyman’s Library edition: F. L. Hudson and C. J. Edwards, “Some Direct Observations on the Aging of Paper,” Paper Technology 7 (1966); cited in Richard Smith, “Paper Impermanence as a Consequence of pH and Storage Conditions,” Library Quarterly 39:2 (April 1969): 183.

4. Cold War librarians: See Library of Congress, “Welsh Named Deputy Librarian,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:4 (January 23, 1976).

5. “warehouses of little-used material”: William J. Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians: Opportunities and Challenges,” paper presented at the seventh international seminar, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Library Center, Kanazawa, Japan, 1989, in Research Libraries — Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. William J. Welsh (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).

6. “vastly more than the microfilming”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”

7. “Disk storage is attractive”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”

8. “the extremely high resolution”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”

9. “reproduce items with sufficient quality”: Carl Fleischhauer, “Research Access and Use: The Key Facet of the Nonprint Optical Disk Experiment,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 42:37 (September 12, 1983). Also quoted in Biggar, “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books.”

10. reduce the three Library of Congress buildings: The article describes the data-retrieval jukebox that is “humming away” in the basement of the Madison building: “Deputy librarian W.J. Welsh says the jukebox, part of a three-year, $2.1 million pilot program, is the face of the bibliographical future — one that could shrink the library’s entire 80 million item collection into one of the library’s three existing building[s].” Ken Ringle, “Card Catalogue to Be Filed Away; Library Turns to Computers,” The Washington Post, November 13, 1984, p. A1, final edition. See also Ellen Z. Hahn, “The Library of Congress Optical Disk Pilot Program: A Report on the Print Project Activities,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 42:44 (October 31, 1983), which gives space and “compaction” as one of the justifications of the optical-disk program. Hahn writes that “miniaturization in some form” is essential because “the likelihood of building another Library building on Capitol Hill is at best remote.” The scanning will be destructive: “In most cases, the print material, that is, periodicals, will be guillotined and then scanned automatically at a rate of one page every two seconds.” One of the benefits of the optical-disk program, according to a later article, is “the elimination of the not-on-shelf or ‘N.O.S.’ problem”: if you destroy the item in order to scan it, it is no longer part of the collection, and therefore won’t be missing when you look for it. Library of Congress, “Library Announces Public Opening of Access to Optical Disk Technology,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:7 (February 17, 1986).

11. war propaganda: During the war, “a division for the study of propaganda analysis was established. What later became the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services was first set up as the Division of Special Information in the Library of Congress….A War Agencies Collection gave duly accredited representatives of the Government access to materials which, for reasons of security, had to be withheld from the public….Exhibits, broadcasts, lectures were designed to reflect the war aims of the United States….Mr. MacLeish was frequently absent, sometimes for extended periods, first as director of the Office of Facts and Figures, subsequently as assistant director of the Office of War Information.” David C. Mearns, The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress, 1800–1946 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1947), p. 214.

12. letter of agreement: The text of the agreement between MacLeish and Donovan is reproduced in William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance (New York: Dial, 1977), pp. 141–44n.

13. “bursting at the seams”: Gurney and Apple, Library of Congress, p. 17.

14. marble-finned kitsch box: The building “reminds some critics of the monumental architecture of the Third Reich.” Stephen Klaidman, “Cultural Center Problems Are Space, Money, Boredom,” The Washington Post, June 12, 1977, p. B1.

15. “miniaturiz[ing] existing collections”: Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians.”

16. “Networking can and should”: Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians.”

CHAPTER 15 — The Road to Avernus

1. groundless guesswork: “Perhaps the most outrageous of Barrow’s distortions of prior work was his equation of 25 years of natural age to 72 hours in a dry oven at 100ºC., with his use of multiples of 72 hours to represent multiples of 25 years. This must have been based on ruler measurement of freehand lines in charts in one NBS [National Bureau of Standards] study; yet this study, the only direct comparison of natural and accelerated aging available when Barrow introduced his equation, warned explicitly and repeatedly that the four data points on which the charts were based were insufficient for quantitative treatment. Later work has removed all credibility from Barrow’s equation; yet it is apparently still used by some librarians and vendors.” Thomas Conroy, “The Need for a Re-evaluation of the Use of Alum in Book Conservation and the Book Arts,” Book and Paper Group Annual 8 (Washington, D.C.: Book and Paper Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, 1989), p. 14n.

2. three days in an artificial-aging oven: Barrow Research Laboratory, Test Data of Naturally Aged Papers (Richmond, Va.: Barrow Research Laboratory, 1964), p. 21. See also Verner Clapp, “The Story of Permanent/Durable Book Paper, 1115–1970 (part 2),” Scholarly Publishing, April 1971, and Smith, “Paper Impermanence,” p. 186.