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

“this kind of mass—“: In 1992, Battin wrote that we must “change our focus from single-item salvation to a mass production process.” “Substitution: The American Experience,” typescript of lecture in Oxford Library Seminars, “Preserving Our Library Heritage,” February 25, 1992, quoted in Abby Smith, “The Future of the Past: Preservation in American Research Libraries” (draft), Council on Library and Information Resources, January 1999.

George Farr…was on board: “The Endowment,” Farr wrote in 1988, supports “the reformatting of knowledge on to a more stable medium, which at this time means microfilm produced and stored to national archival standards, in the absense of similar national standards for other media. The scale of the preservation problem, coupled with the fragility of most of these materials and the expense of item-by-item conservation, makes any other course of action impractical.” Farr, “Preservation.”

“Slash and burn preservation”: Paul Conway, “Yale University Library’s Project Open Book: Preliminary Research Findings,” D-Lib Magazine, February 1996, www.dlib.org/dlib/february96/yale/02conway.htm.

“approximately 7 %”: Harvard University, “History of Science: Preserving Collections for the Study of Culture and Society,” proposal submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1998), p. 27.

several thousand “pams”: “Columbia University used $696,000 to microfilm 9,797 embrittled pamphlets on social and economic history published from 1880 to 1950,” according to the NEH’s website—$71.04 per pamphlet. National Endowment for the Humanities, “Brittle Books,” www.neh.gov/preservation/brittlebooks.htm (viewed October 4, 2000). (The page includes a picture—“Example of a brittle book”—of a book whose binding has failed, over which one of its pages has apparently been crumpled and sprinkled.) The New York Public Library’s discard of approximately one hundred thousand pamphlets so troubled collector Michael Zinman that he distributed a poster in 1997 that reproduced some of the accessions stamps and gift bookplates from these lost collections; the headline was it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it — the words of an American officer who attacked a Vietnamese town in 1968. See Mark Singer’s Talk of the Town article on Zinman and the pamphlets (which were microfilmed), The New Yorker, January 12, 1998.

CHAPTER 30 — A Swifter Conflagration

“Scarcely a day now passes”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” in his Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1998), p. 14.

“placed in the charge”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Statement on the Role of Books and Manuscripts in the Electronic Age,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 334.

“The term ‘preservation’ ”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Latest Forms of Book-Burning,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 90.

“sizable portions”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Statement on the Significance of Primary Records,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 335.

may qualify as objects: See, for instance, appendix 1 of Elkington, RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook, “Considerations for Retaining Items in Original Format.” Items that contain illustrations “not easily reproduced or meaningful only in the original color or original woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, etc.” are possible candidates for retention, as is “ephemeral material likely to be scarce, such as a lettersheet, poster, songster, or broadside.” Newspapers qualify under both these categories, but that hasn’t helped them.

“Books of high market value”: G. Thomas Tanselle, “Reproductions and Scholarship,” in his Literature and Artifacts, p. 83.

“I think it is undeniable”: Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” p. 17.

“approaching books as museum objects”: Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” p. 5.

“Most books are not frequently used”: Tanselle, “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” p. 16.

“A central repository”: Tanselle, “Reproductions and Scholarship,” p. 88.

“Although it is a pity”: Tanselle, “Latest Forms of Book-Burning,” p. 95.

CHAPTER 32 — A Figure We Did Not Collect

“We have not done so”: George Farr, letter to the author, April 5, 1999.

“Analysis of 15 years”: Montori, “Re: electronic/paper format & weeding.”

staple-bound purple booklet: Martha Kyrillidou, Michael O’Connor, and Julia C. Blixrud, ARL Preservation Statistics, 1996–97 (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1998).

“dramatic reduction”: Jutta R. Reed, “Cost Comparison of Periodicals in Hard Copy and on Microform,” Microform Review 5:3 (July 1976).

as determined by the formulas: The formulas, Reed-Scott notes, are adapted from UMI founder Eugene Power’s 1951 article “Microfilm as a Substitute for Binding”; Power was one of Verner Clapp’s and Luther Evans’s colleagues on the board of the microphilic American Documentation Institute, now the American Society for Information Science (ASIS).

save over $145 : Ann Niles questions these figures in “Conversion of Serials from Paper to Microfilm,” Microform Review 9:2 (spring 1980). She calculates that the cost of buying microfilm replacements of a collection of periodicals would be almost twice the cost of building new on-site space to house them, and to that must be added the maintenance and replacement of the microfilm readers, which have a life-span of five to ten years.

CHAPTER 33 — Leaf Masters

“a heavy proportion”: Stam, “Questions of Preservation.”

“Based on a non-scientific survey”: Gay Walker, “One Step Beyond: The Future of Preservation Microfilming,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production.

“Of all responding libraries”: Jan Merrill-Oldham and Gay Walker, Brittle Books Programs (Washington, D.C.: Systems and Procedures Exchange Center [SPEC] Kit 152, Office of Management Services, Association of Research Libraries, 1989), introductory flyer and p. vi.

“have all ownership marks removed”: Gay Walker, “Preservation Decision Making: A Descriptive Model,” in Merrill-Oldham and Walker, Brittle Books Programs, p. 35.

“In the great majority of cases”: Gay Walker, “Preservation Decision-Making and Archival Photocopying,” Restaurator 8 (1987).

filmed another 150,000: At the congressional hearing in March 1987, William Welsh told committee members that the library had microfilmed four hundred thousand volumes between 1968 and 1987—about twenty thousand per year (Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 123). The number may be lower than this, however; the Office of Technology Assessment’s Book Preservation Technologies said in 1988 that the Library of Congress “microfilms between 10,000 and 20,000 brittle monographs and serials per year at a cost of about $40 per volume” (p. 14). On the other hand, in March 1983, Peter Sparks told a reporter from Discover magazine: “I can’t microfilm them fast enough. We can manage about 23,000 books a year — and there are millions of them out there.”

“A major concern about filming”: Walker, “One Step Beyond,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production.

“the highest quality film”: Vickie Lockhart and Ann Swartzell, “Evaluation of Microfilm Vendors,” Microform Review 19:3 (summer 1990). In the study, the company that missed pages is given as “RP,” which I assume stands for Research Publications.