Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  To raise money, Haas felt that they would have to “expand awareness among the general public”—and among librarians—and to do that they would need a set of traveling exhibits about paper and its decline, and a “carefully written and well designed booklet describing the dangers of collection deterioration,” even perhaps a film.12

  Haas couldn’t get all this rolling in 1972, but he was a patient man. Jack Sawyer, president of the Mellon Foundation (and former OSS outpost chief in Paris13), liked Haas’s “savvy, shrewdness,14 battle-weariness, and enthusiasm,” and had him installed as head of the Council on Library Resources; by the mid-eighties, Haas, with the horrifying fold-test statistics from Yale and the Library of Congress in his back pocket, was ready for a second big push. In 1986, he wrote and published a yellow booklet, carefully written and moderately well designed, called Brittle Books. (No author appears on the title page, but when I asked Haas who had written it, he said, “I wrote it.”) The booklet summarized several meetings of a certain Committee on Preservation and Access (meetings paid for by the Exxon Education Foundation), whose attendees included the Library of Congress’s own Peter Sparks and William Welsh, Sidney Verba from Harvard, Gay Walker from Yale, Harold Cannon from the NEH, and other interested parties. “Careful analytical work15 undertaken in several leading libraries confirms that books printed on acidic paper begin to deteriorate rapidly fifty years or so after publication,” Haas wrote in the little yellow book. (No analytical work undertaken anywhere confirms that; if anything, acidic paper deteriorates more slowly after fifty years, as available reactants are used up.) A fourth of the volumes in old, large research libraries are “so embrittled that they will soon become useless,” Haas asserts, citing Yale’s survey and the others—brittleness being defined as a paper’s liability to break “after one or two double folds of a page corner.” We must preserve these books and, just as important, provide “wider and more equitable access” to them. The goal of the microfilming effort is to create “a new national library of preserved materials.” Books with intrinsic value (those with “important marginal notes,” for example) ought to be “safeguarded as artifacts”—but for most brittle books “reproduction of content is the only realistic course of action; otherwise, an important segment of the human record will be lost forever.”

  There, that’s how to market it. Tell the people that if libraries aren’t given the money to microfilm these books (and to chuck them out when they’re done, but probably best not to stress the chucking-out part too much), people will lose the human record forever. That will get them to listen. “Extraordinary means for capturing the attention of a wide and diverse audience must be found,” Haas wrote. “The Committee is agreed that those who are concerned with preserving our intellectual heritage must speak with one voice if funding and participation are to reach required levels.”

  Haas was himself a dogged fund-raiser, and he soon convinced the Exxon Education Foundation to give the Council another grant of $1.2 million; part of the money would found a regional microfilming service-bureau called MAPS (Mid-Atlantic Preservation Services, later Preservation Resources) and part would help pay for a movie. Haas began interviewing filmmakers.

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  Special Offer

  By this time, the microfilm industry—University Microfilms and the other commercial micropublishers and service bureaus, along with the big library labs at the New York Public Library, Yale, Harvard, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, and the Library of Congress—needed a major crisis of paper deterioration in order to divert attention from the many misfortunes besetting their own medium. Library users did not like microfilm, that was clear, and they didn’t like microfiche any better—whether spooled or cut into rectangular sheets, the microphotographic medium was a bust. Even some formerly enthusiastic librarians were becoming more cautious about buying lots of microtext for their collection—the entire micropublishing industry had acquired a faint cheesiness of tone. Allen Veaner, of Microform Review, mentions the sixties influx of federal money for “collection building”1 in college libraries: some libraries bought lots of film or fiche in order to boost their title counts quickly to a level that would allow them to receive one kind of accreditation2 or another. Overheated demand increased the number of micropublishers, and some of them were, writes Veaner,

  shady entrepreneurs3 anxious to cash in on quick profits from micropublication schemes. Unfortunately, with the exception of the largest professional producers, malpractice is often the rule rather than the exception.

  One interestingly shady practice was the offer to take old bound journals and newspapers in trade for new microfilm. A library would allow a film salesman to pick up several hundred bound volumes, expecting to get a microfilmed set in return. But the microfilm wouldn’t arrive, and the salesman would begin spinning stories, and the volumes were never seen again—sold to dealers. A man named Charles Venick, who reportedly “perspires a lot,” worked the substitution scam on librarians in California, Iowa, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma in the late sixties and early seventies, until he was finally arrested. One library lost bound volumes “valuing in excess of $10,000.” Murray Martin, who first exposed the practice, wrote that librarians were seeking the benefit of “disposing easily and profitably4 of shelf-eating stock.”

  But these deals didn’t always end unhappily. Pamela Darling, head of the preservation office at the New York Public Library in the seventies, wrote in Library Journal that one way to pay for microfilming is “to cooperate with micropublishers5 who plan to market microform copies. In most such cases, the library will receive free film in return for the loan of the original material; reprint fees or royalty payments on sales are sometimes involved.” Since as a rule, according to Darling, once the microfilm is obtained, “the original material may then be disposed of” (except for rare books), this sort of arrangement “can be of great benefit to the library,” if entered into cautiously and carefully.

  Financial inducements to get rid of originals by offering free filming continue today. In 1998, Heritage Microfilm, out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa (which did a lot of microfilming for Iowa’s NEH- and state-funded newspaper project6), had this come-on on its website:

  SPECIAL OFFER

  FREE filming for newspapers with a subscription to your own film. Call 888-870-0484 or email us for a quote on your next filming project.

  (They’ve removed it now; now their website says “We will return your documents after filming if desired. Or, material will be destructed after a 90 day holding period to ensure you are completely satisfied. All destroyed materials are recycled.”) The digital world has picked up on the swap offer, too—the Mellon Foundation’s JSTOR project recently offered libraries a thirty-dollar credit against annual database fees for the first five bound volumes of a set that a library donated for scanning, five dollars per volume after that. If you weren’t a JSTOR subscriber, they would send you a check. If you wanted to “loan” the volumes, JSTOR would pay or credit you twenty dollars per volume, five dollars per volume after the first five—that is, if you allowed disbinding and didn’t require that the loose remains be boxed individually. (Suppose you let someone borrow your car and they returned it to you as a pile of scrap metal, along with a photograph of it. Would you define the transaction as a loan?) In this way, JSTOR gets fresh journal sets to chop and scan, and at the same time, by including a financial incentive for libraries to reduce their nonvirtual stores, they sharpen the need for centrally sourced digital surrogates. The more physical texts that leave the shelves, the more electronic copies must go through wires, which makes the people who control the tariffs on the wires happy: one form of marketing for preservation.

  Yes, the seventies were, writes one historian, the “gilded age7 of microforms in libraries,” but there were signs of rebellion even then. In the pages of Microform Review, Stephen Salmon published a critique of microfilm’s quality and usability: “Let’s suppose that the us
er8 has found the microform he wants, found a reader, and somehow managed to get one mounted on the other. Then what does he see? The answer seems to be: all kinds of things but not necessarily what he might expect—fingers; smudges and stains; scratches; dirt and dust; text cut off in the margin; missing pages; images reversed, upside down, or out of order; and assorted blurs, caused by improper lighting, improper contrast, poor resolution, and lack of proper focus.” Salmon also quotes a survey respondent who said that microfilm was “an information burial system.”9

  And then there was the question of longevity. Reviewing microfilm’s silver-emulsional troubles in 1978, Carl Spaulding, at the Council on Library Resources, pointed out that since libraries don’t usually store their film at the extremely low humidity levels specified by industry standards, “the plain fact is that10 almost no libraries can claim to have archivally permanent film.” He ended with a series of bluntly bulleted recommendations, of which the first was: “Most libraries abandon the delusion that their microform collections are permanent.” Well, then, why bother? Unless the desire to save space overrides all other motives, why struggle to reproduce books and newspapers in salts or vesicles or silver gelatins that may well not last as long as the originals would have?

  The reason Spaulding gives is interesting. He, like many others who were once stimulated by microphotography, was already, by the late seventies, tiring of it, and responding instead to the high-pitched digitarian dog whistle. It is difficult to believe, Spaulding predicted, that in fifty or even twenty-five years libraries would own lots of microfilm; it seemed to him much more likely that “information now commonly recorded on microform will be stored in electronic form in a few central locations to be accessed from any one of the countless online terminals.” We needn’t worry about microfilm’s deterioriation, Spaulding implies—we’ll be throwing it all out anyway.

  You might expect, with all of microfilm’s woes—the illegible early projects, the user-resistance studies that showed a widespread dissatisfaction with the reading experience, the periodic lapses of quality combined with the practical impossibility of checking for lapses, the frauds and malpractices, the abandoned formats, and the various physical afflictions that the film itself was heir to—that preservation visionaries would have become cautious, by the mid-1980s, in their plans to “salvage” major collections by this means. Instead, the preservationists’ scare numbers grew, and their imagery became more extreme, as they gradually learned how to sell the problem of aging books as a crisis for the civilized world. They spoke with one voice, as Warren Haas hoped they would, but what they said was increasingly estranged from reality.

  Margaret Child, a consultant for the Council on Library Resources and a former NEH strategizer who had attended Haas’s brittle-books summits, wrote in 1985 that in order to build a preservational infrastructure, “we need massive infusions11 of ‘foreign aid’—subsidies from government and private foundations, direct funding by local and national governments, and the diversion of institutional funding to preservation programs of all kinds.” University administrators must be “persuaded that there is indeed a crisis serious enough to demand diversion of substantial amounts of funding,” and scholars “need to be targeted,”12 for although they are the “primary users of the materials endangered, [they] remain remarkably unsupportive of any kind of reformatting.” (Unsupportive, possibly, because they know the tribulations of microfilm, and the boon of having the original book in hand; with a very few exceptions—such as Randy Silverman, the director of preservation at the University of Utah, who is an expert in nineteenth-century bookbinding—preservation librarians don’t do the kind of historical research that would require them to give their library a regular workout.) Moreover, says Margaret Child,

  the general public needs13 to be alerted that the threatened loss of our collective memories has at least as commanding a claim to its attention and its tax dollars as the deterioration of historic buildings or the natural environment.

  Child is at pains, however, to emphasize that reformatting is not a “universal panacea”:14

  Microfilming is only one of the treatments at our command for dealing with the plague of paper deterioration, just as radiation therapy is but one of the options to be considered by an oncologist confronted by a malignancy.

  Like radiation therapy, microfilming isn’t “an ideal or very pleasant method of treatment,” Child writes, but “in the last analysis, its value as a treatment is indisputable in those cases in which the patient would die.” The weakness of this analogy is that your typical doctor believes that when he prescribes radiation therapy he has a reasonable chance of keeping a patient alive, while your typical late-eighties preservation-reformatter disposed of the patient after a last afternoon on the X-ray table. In fact, it was better if you dismembered the patient first, because you could get higher quality X rays that way for less.

  As the metaphorized stridency intensified, Haas, Child, Sparks, Welsh, and the other brittle-bookers began to see results. In 1985, Haas met with William (Book of Virtues) Bennett at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he “talked passionately,” as he describes it, on behalf of preservation. Bennett acted; a week before he was to leave for his new job in Ronald Reagan’s cabinet as secretary of education, he founded an Office of Preservation at the NEH. That gave the lobbyists something to fix on: entreat Congress to give the Office of Preservation more money. “That was the beginning of real effort,” Haas recalls, “as opposed to Library of Congress effort.”

  Now—how much money would the effort require?

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  3.3 Million Books, 358 Million Dollars

  To answer the extremely important money question, Haas hired (circa November 1984) Robert M. Hayes, distinguished dean of UCLA’s School of Library and Information Science, to write, against a six-week deadline, a report entitled “Analysis of the Magnitude,1 Costs, and Benefits of the Preservation of Research Library Books.” Hayes was a network consultant2 for libraries and an early computer-connectivity expert; his digital career went back to the vacuum-tube days, when he used the National Bureau of Standards’ very fast fifties machine, the SWAC,3 now esteemed by historians of computer evolution. At Hughes Aircraft, at Magnavox,4 and then as head of a venture called Advanced Information Systems, Hayes helped design data-management systems for the National Security Agency, the Air Force’s Ballistic Missiles Division, the National Science Foundation, and Douglas Aircraft. But in the early sixties, Hayes decided to make library automation his life; he and the CIA’s Joseph Becker,5 who became his business partner, developed the library-of-the-future exhibition in Seattle, and Verner Clapp gave the two of them a grant to write Information Storage and Retrieval (1963), a rich compendium of hardware and methods.

  Like Clapp and Fremont Rider, Hayes was troubled by the problem of growth. He, too, had an answer, and it wasn’t more shelves. “The most far-reaching solution6 to the problems posed by library growth,” he and Becker wrote in the Handbook of Data Processing for Libraries (1970), “is the creation of cooperative library networks.” Hayes might seem to be an unlikely person to write a manifesto for a gigantic microfilming program, since he had spent a good three decades as a database frontiersman, and yet once Hayes got going, and the macroeconomic numbers started rolling like flatcars through his brain, he demonstrated why he was the ideal choice for the job.

  What Hayes did was sift through all the statistical deterioriation surveys—Yale’s, Stanford’s, the Library of Congress’s, and others—pulling percentages from dozens of places, cleaving to the ideal of consistency wherever possible and, where it wasn’t, saying so and plunging ahead anyway. And he did some arithmetic.

  Assume, he began, that the nation’s libraries hold 305 million books—or volumes, rather, since the figure includes periodicals. If you apply the Library of Congress’s MIT Fold Test results to that figure, and call twenty-five percent of them brittle, you have 76 million volumes curr
ently “at risk.” Assume that in another twenty years, 38 million more will attain “at-risk” status. Assume that of those 114 million volumes, nine out of ten are duplicates. That leaves you with 11.4 million at-risk volumes that would be available over the next twenty years for microfilming. In most cases (as Hayes points out in a supplemental report), the work would require guillotining, “effectively destroying7 the original as a book.”

  Not all 11.4 million would have to be filmed, though. To estimate how many would, Hayes relied on a 1984 “Preservation Plan8 for Textual (Paper) Records for the National Archives of the United States,” which recommends that the archives repair or otherwise conserve seventeen percent of its holdings, mass-deacidify twenty-eight percent, “dispose” of six percent, leave twenty-four percent alone for now (as part of their planned deterioration), and microfilm the remaining thirty-three percent. (Why these numbers add up to more than a hundred Hayes does not explain.)

  Now we’re almost there. If we apply the National Archives’ number, and assume that one third of the national at-risk population is microfilm-worthy, that brings us to 3.8 million volumes. But some of those have already been microfilmed—the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, to name but two, have not been idle. Hayes invoked a percentage from an American Theological Libraries study, where 13.3 percent of the sample had existing microfilm.