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

“to cooperate with micropublishers”: Pamela Darling, “Developing a Preservation Microfilming Program,” Library Journal, November 1, 1974.

Iowa’s NEH- and state-funded newspaper project: Prison inmates hired by the State Historical Society of Iowa prepped the pages. But the historical society didn’t participate in Heritage’s free filming offer, because they wanted to keep control of their master negatives.

“gilded age”: Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”

“Let’s suppose that the user”: Salmon, “User Resistance.”

“an information burial system”: Harold Wooster, Microfiche 1969—a User Survey (Arlington, Va.: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1969), quoted in Salmon, “User Resistance.” Another librarian wrote Wooster: “Daily we have an experience which breaks my librarians’ hearts. Our users come in or call up for information. We research and locate it. In those instances when they are told we have it only on microfiche, the reply is ‘forget it’ usually accompanied by an emphatic wave of a hand.” Daniel Gore writes: “Underlying most decisions to purchase microcollections is, I believe, an instinctive realization that such things will, with few exceptions, get little or no use once they are acquired.” Daniel Gore, “The View from the Tower of Babel,” in To Know a Library (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), originally published in Library Journal, September 15, 1975; quoted in John Swan, “Micropermanence and Electronic Evanescence,” Microform Review 20:2 (spring 1991).

“the plain fact is that”: Spaulding, “Kicking the Silver Habit.”

“we need massive infusions”: Margaret S. Child, “The Future of Cooperative Preservation Microfilming,” Library Resources and Technical Services 29:1 (January/March 1985): 96.

“need to be targeted”: Child, “Future,” p. 100.

“the general public needs”: Child, “Future,” p. 100.

“universal panacea”: Child, “Future,” p. 96.

CHAPTER 21 — 3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars

“Analysis of the Magnitude”: Robert M. Hayes, “Analysis of the Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits of the Preservation of Research Library Books: A Working Paper Prepared for the Council on Library Resources,” January 21, 1985. With further funding from the Council on Library Resources, Hayes followed this up with a longer report in 1987, which included a revealing survey of attitudes toward microfilm. (“Nearly half the respondents regarded microform, in general, as UNACCEPTABLE,” Hayes writes, and he quotes responses such as “Film is the last resort; never use if we can get copy”; and “Personally abhor microfilm for use”; and “Intolerable for reading, especially hard technical reading”; and “Easier to see thing in newspaper in the original.”) The second, expanded version was entitled “The Magnitude, Costs, and Benefits of the Preservation of Brittle Books,” November 30, 1987; in it, the original 1985 working paper was reprinted, exactly as it was first published, as “Report #0.” Robert M. Hayes, e-mail letter to author, June 21, 1999.

Hayes was a network consultant: Hayes’s papers are at UCLA; the OCLC entry for them (accession no. 37992540) includes a biographical note. See also Anne Woodsworth and Barbara von Wahlde, eds., Leadership for Research Libraries: A Festschrift for Robert M. Hayes (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988), which includes an incomplete biography and a bibliography — Hayes’s work for the military is either unmentioned or shielded behind acronyms such as USAFBMD.

SWAC: The Standards Western Automatic Computer was designed by an Englishman, Harry Huskey, in 1950. Robert Hayes used it on problems of “matrix decomposition,” but the SWAC was also employed to calculate Mersenne primes, useful for cryptography. Hayes wrote me: “Much of the work of staff at the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA”—home of the SWAC—“was actually concerned with coding and decoding methods. I am sure that NSA funding was important. That wasn’t the focus of my own work, so I cannot say for certain, but from all that I have learned since then, I am sure it was the case.”

Magnavox: In the late fifties, Magnavox invented the Magnacard system of information storage, an unsuccessful product. Also, as subcontractors for Kodak, Magnavox’s engineers worked on the electronics for the Minicard System, developed for the Air Force and the CIA.

Joseph Becker: Hayes had no consulting contracts with the CIA, he informs me; he took care not to discuss the CIA with Becker. Hayes would have been “delighted to have had such contracts for both financial and intellectual reasons,” but they were not forthcoming.

“The most far-reaching solution”: Robert M. Hayes and Joseph Becker, Handbook of Data Processing for Libraries (New York: Becker and Hayes, 1970), p. 69.

“effectively destroying”: Hayes, “The Cost Analysis for the Preservation Project: Report # 3 on the Preservation Project,” in his “The Magnitude,” p. 27.

a 1984 “Preservation Plan”: Hayes, “Analysis of the Magnitude,” p. 15.

CHAPTER 22 — Six Thousand Bodies a Day

“many documents”: Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 1.

“dangerously brittle state”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 40.

“Across the country”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 39.

“facing extinction”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 31.

“French generals”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 35.

“almost a dead book”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 23.

“A mind is a terrible”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 24. Vartan Gregorian may not have written this speech himself and so perhaps should not be held responsible for all of it. Gregorian’s remarks were repeated nearly verbatim a year later in a talk by the New York Public Library’s Richard De Gennaro. Here is Gregorian, before Congress: “Anyone of us who uses books and paper is exposed to the problem of deteriorating paper. Looking at a four day old Washington Post, or a four year old paperback, they decay before our eyes.” Here is De Gennaro: “Any one of us who uses books and paper is exposed to the problem of deteriorating paper. Look at a four-day-old newspaper or a four-year-old paperback. They decay before our eyes.” Richard De Gennaro, “Research Libraries: Mankind’s Memory at Risk,” in Luner, Paper Preservation. De Gennaro went on to run Harvard’s library system.

“Our thrust at the Endowment”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 3.

“has only been in the forefront”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 37.

“We are dependent upon people”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 33.

“Our research houses”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 44.

“join in the task”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 61.

“a kind of giant step”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 125.

“The purpose of the work”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 60.

“The books themselves”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 58.

“It is not unlikely”: Subcommittee, Oversight Hearing, p. 109.

CHAPTER 23 — Burning Up

Haas himself (blue shirt): Terry Sanders, Slow Fires, written by Ben Maddow and narrated by Robert MacNeil, a presentation of the American Film Foundation (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, 1987). The film exists in an hour version and a half-hour version. The longer version was the original one; this account is based on it.

trying tendentiousness: For example, near the end of Slow Fires, we move slowly past an enormous computer, while Robert MacNeil says, “Stone, clay, canvas, paper, tape, and disk — a human diary, a chain of knowledge that connects everyone to everyone else. All our faith, passion, and skill — all the horror and beauty of the generations past — are left for us to ponder, unless we choose to let it wither, disintegrate, burn, and die, leaving us to stumble in the dark.”