Disposable Society
Baker titles his exposé after a test librarians have been using for years to check the longevity of paper — the “double fold” test, whereby a corner of a page is folded back and forth (and sometimes pinched) until it breaks. The “double fold” test is used to determine whether it's time to microfilm a book before its content gets lost forever, or, in the case of a newspaper, before destroying it.
Double Fold is an indictment of libraries like Chicago and Yale, as well as librarians, foundations, including Mellon and Ford, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most of all, the Library of Congress. From Patricia Battin, former librarian of Columbia University, who led the “assault on paper” and received the National Medal of the Humanities from President Clinton in 1999 for “saving the knowledge of the past for the children of tomorrow,” to Pamela Darling, “a cheerfully unrepentant thrower-outer,” Baker unveils a motley of eggheads: the slash-and-burners, the destroyers, the space makers, the butchers of books. For Baker, not saving every book and every newspaper means that history will suffer, will be forgotten. And, thinking that microfilming is the trick to saving history, is, according to Baker, nothing but a delusion of modernity.
Baker's biggest problem is that newspapers and books are being destroyed in order to be preserved. He makes a good case for paper, arguing that paper holds up much better than we think — especially paper manufactured after 1870. His second-biggest problem is with the space makers — the librarians who like to say, “If you don't have room, just get rid of it!” The space makers like to give away, sell off, or throw out. But what really irks Baker is that the space makers like to come up with inane ideas purportedly aimed at preservation — ideas like developing techniques to de-acidify paper, techniques that, millions of dollars later, ultimately result in the complete destruction of thousands of books and newspapers. In one egregious case, “experts” at the Library of Congress and the Council on Library Resources came up with an experiment using a substance called DEZ, or diethyl zinc. DEZ, said the Library of Congress, could potentially de-acidify paper by creating a “alkaline buffer” in the fibers of the paper. The only problem is that DEZ can't come near air or water. So the experiment resulted in what Baker describes as “a large fuel-air bomb that happened to contain books.”
Here's the dilemma: to destroy or not to destroy in order to preserve information — historical information — that should be at our fingertips generations hence. Gary Frost, a man in the business of making photocopies at a place in Texas called Booklab, says the idea of discarding thousands of books in order to preserve their content was “a right-wing paramilitary objective — or no, a left-wing paramilitary objective.” Baker says Frost regrets the “very strong undercurrent in the USA toward disposability, toward favoring clean copy over soiled original.”
Preserving the Originals
Surely there are documents, newspapers, books, and manuscripts that are more valuable sources of information than others? How can we save everything? And, more importantly, must we?
Alexander Rose, a friend of mine, was working on a doctorate a few years ago that required exhaustive hours of research in places like Churchill College, Cambridge. For him, originals, at least some, must be kept. Examining Churchill's “Blood, Sweat and Tears” speech, for example, which is housed in fireproof vaults in Churchill College and can only be viewed after ordering them up from the stacks, is a wondrous experience. “The one I held was the original original; a speech in abbreviations and cut up sentences with red pencil markings on it. It then got tidied up for reading and final draft.”
Especially for historians, it is often impossible to replace the experience of the object. At the same time, equating newspapers and magazines and books with a certain art-object status, which Baker attempts, can be both a confusing and dangerous argument to make. In this view, one does not necessarily keep an object because it is beautiful now, but because one day it may be useful. In the case of newspapers, and in partial defense of Baker, it is hard to imagine today the need for copies of the New York Times four hundred years from now, but when today's digital/computer techniques turn obsolete, it may just be useful to have the originals on hand.
The NEH's response to Baker? “We are reviewing [Double Fold] by Nicholson Baker, and we will consider any implications it may have on NEH's support for preservation efforts in this area.”
There are libraries around the world that do save original copies of books and newspapers, including the British Library, the Boston Public Library, and even the New York Public Library. The goal of the National Endowment for the Humanities in supporting the preservation of fragile books and newspapers is “to both preserve knowledge and ensure accessibility of this knowledge to scholars, teachers, the American public and future generations.”
History's Safekeeping
Baker does make a few specific policy recommendations: Items that are going to be discarded by libraries receiving public funding should be available to the public; the Library of Congress should establish a national repository for the items that they no longer want to store, or don't have room for; libraries across the country should start saving the country's current newspapers in bound form; and the NEH should either abolish the U.S. Newspaper Program or require that microfilming and digital scanning be nondestructive (meaning, keep all originals).
Some companies and foundations and individuals have figured out ways to preserve information, including Corbis and the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island. Corbis, home of the Bettmann Archive, a 16-million photograph image rental library now owned by Bill Gates, will soon be moving from New York City to an underground limestone mine 220 feet under the ground. Otto Bettmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, turned two trunks filled with photographs into the world's largest collection of images — approximately 200,000 of which are now digitized and viewable at www.corbis.com. Corbis is creating the modern, subzero, low-humidity storage area because it will be free from natural disaster, vandals, and the simple damage of time. Eventually, Corbis hopes to give the public web access to all of its photographs. Similarly, the American Family Immigration History Center has digitized the historical information on 22 million immigrants, passengers, and crewmembers who entered the United States through the Port of New York between 1892-1924. The data were taken directly from microfilms of the ships' original passenger manifests provided by the National Archives and Records Administration. Stephen A. Briganti, president and CEO of the Foundation, said, “Polls tell us that over 60% of Americans are interested in family history research. Information that previously might have taken months to find is now a click away.”
In the end, places like the Library of Congress and the British Library have a certain amount of responsibility in history's safekeeping — whether in the form of book, newspaper, or picture. Isn't the purpose of a national library to store original information for the nation? If these libraries require extra storage, the funding needs to be provided. At the same time, smaller libraries across the country, and research libraries like Yale and Chicago, shouldn't be required to save all originals as if they were art-objects on display in exhibition halls. For current purposes, documents, newspapers, and all sorts of other bits of historical information, should be available to as many people as possible. Very few people are going to trek off to places like Mr. Baker's American Newspaper Repository in Rollinsford, N.H. in order to find a newspaper from 1900. But now we have more choices: Go to the web, read it on microfilm, or order up from the stacks.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
