Why couldn’t Clapp have shown a little patience, and funded more quiet inquiries into techniques of cataloging Persian works (as some traditionalist members of his board6565 would have much preferred him to do), reconciling himself to the fact that whatever glorious man-machine couplings were in the offing, they weren’t going to happen in his lifetime? Why couldn’t he have left library administrators alone, rather than forever distracting them from their primary task as paper-keepers by dangling the lure of convulsive change before them, long before the change was practical, and long before it had revealed its many risks? Clapp especially goaded his alma mater, the Library of Congress, to invest in seductive prematurities, early systems that broke down, cost a fortune, spread confusion, didn’t focus, made life more difficult, and failed in general to do what they were built or bought to do. Forty years and many generations of scrapped prototypes later, libraries are still trying to get Clapp’s remote-access full-text wish-list to fly.
But brute shrinkage was the idea closest to Clapp’s heart, and there (despite the disappointments of machines like the Verac) the basic technology was already mature. Microtext, he wrote, has “rescued many millions of pages6666 of newspapers from oblivion at comparatively low cost and with a concomitant saving of space”—the next step, then, was to perform a similar sort of “rescue” on journals and then books. The question was how to pay for it. In College and Research Libraries, Alan Pritsker and William Sadler had, in 1957, dealt an inadvertent blow to the burgeoning micro-movement in a cost study that found microfilming to be of financial appeal as an alternative form of storage only if libraries (and their patrons) were willing to tolerate (1) somewhat fuzzy print, (2) minimal quality control, and (3) “the destruction of the text.”6767 (The researchers assumed textual destruction because the microfilming system that they were using in their estimates of work-flow, the RemRand Model 12, required that pages be “fed automatically into the machine.” That in itself was not a problem, the authors wrote: “Since the purpose of microfilming is to reduce the space requirements, the cutting of the bindings is considered inconsequential. Any possible gain from the resale value of these books would be more than offset by the increased efficiency in filming.”) And yet, despite their diligent efforts, Pritsker and Sadler found microfilm conversion to be a costlier means of storage for research libraries than bookshelves. (Alan Pritsker, incidentally, went on to become a pioneer of digital simulation, creating the computer languages JASP for the Air Force and GERT for NASA.)
Clapp responded to these unwelcome results by having the Council commission a similar study, completed in 1961. The Crerar Library6868 in Chicago, a privately endowed reference library whose social sciences collection had been sold off by Clapp’s former Library of Congress colleague Herman Henkle, was supporting itself by marketing its services to places like the Atomic Energy Commission, whose Nuclear Science Abstracts Crerar’s librarians produced. The library was moving6969 from an old building to a squat glass box on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology; there were many pre-1920s journals in the collection which took up space. Clapp and Henkle felt, or hoped, that microfilming these volumes might be cheaper than continuing to store them, but they couldn’t be sure, especially with Pritsker’s discouraging results; so Clapp asked a small consulting firm to perform an operations-research analysis on the problem, “Costs and Material Handling7070 Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals.” Clapp, too, allowed his engineers to assume “shearing of spines” in their estimates, since spine-shearing allows for “considerable labor saving7171 in the photographic operation by avoiding the necessity for raising and lowering the pressure plate each time a page is turned.”
This time around, the cost comparisons came out a little better. It now appeared, according to Clapp’s summary of the research, that with enough buyers of prints of the microfilm, a large microfilming project could successfully reduce a library’s storage costs without any of the sacrifices that Pritsker and Sadler enumerated—no sacrifices, that is, “except that of destruction7272 of the text.”
CHAPTER 10
* * *
The Preservation Microfilming Office
The newspapers went first, but as the filmable remainder of their own bound backfiles dwindled, library planners began to look around for other ways to occupy their now fully staffed and equipped information-renewal programs. “It’s like having a sausage factory, in a way,” one former Library of Congress department head told me. “You’ve got to feed the beast.” (The library owned twenty-four microfilm cameras1 in 1973; they were shooting seven thousand feet of negative film per day.) Books with brittle paper were one good possibility—shabby, unattractively aging, toned by time. In the mid-sixties, the library, again in the vanguard, began segregating thousands of books that were (as the 1968 annual report of the Council on Library Resources phrased it) “otherwise beyond redemption.”2 Coincidentally, the library needed more space: “Space was a key word3 in the thinking and activities of this division [the Office of Collections Maintenance and Preservation] during fiscal 1966,” reported the Library of Congress Information Bulletin. In 1967, Verner Clapp’s last year as president, the Council gave the Library of Congress (via the Association of Research Libraries) a grant for a Pilot Preservation Project, to explore “arrangements for assuring the preservation4 of these [brittle] books for the continuing uses of the research community.”
One interesting idea, which had been propounded by Gordon Williams in a 1962 study (also prepared with the help of a grant from the Council), was to save a physical copy of every significant book in a central, low-temperature storage warehouse, where it would be available for microfilming on demand. A benefit of the plan, according to Williams, was that libraries would then know what they could “safely discard”5 if they wanted to, since there was one backup in deep freeze. This well-intentioned conceit proved in the end administratively unwieldy, but the research done in connection with it, which compared some of the Library of Congress’s books with the same titles held in other libraries, showed that the condition of a given book “varied greatly”6 from library to library: an important observation, since it implied that book longevity depends on local variables (humidity and temperature, rough treatment, styles of rebinding) as much as it does on the innate chemical properties—the “inherent vice”—of the paper.
Then it came time to relocate all those brittle books to high-density, low-cost housing. (In a later era, some stack areas in the Library of Congress’s Jefferson building were reportedly known as “the slums.”7) The library hired Frazer G. Poole8 as preservation officer; Poole had a degree in aerological engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy (aerology, in Navy parlance, is the study of flying weather; the usage dates back to dirigibles) and eight years of experience directing the Library Technology Project of the American Library Association, where, at Clapp’s suggestion9 and with Clapp’s money, Poole developed performance standards for commercial bookbinding—which may be the reason that the Library of Congress did so much indiscriminate rebinding10 in those days. In 1968, Poole created a Preservation Office, whence blossomed the Preservation Microfilming Office (PMO), which filmed ninety-three million pages (three hundred thousand non-newspaper volumes11) betweeen 1968 and 1984. In the eighties, the PMO had a staff of nineteen; they were transfiguring two hundred thousand guillotined pages per week. All of this material was pronounced “embrittled to the extent12 that it was no longer serviceable.” We’ll never know what “no longer serviceable” means, because the vast majority of those books are gone. One of the PMO’s managers explained the eventual disposition of these three hundred thousand items:
The volumes are cut,13 filmed by the Photoduplication Services, and the negative and positive copies are edited. All volumes, except those unique titles to be retained after filming, are sent to the Exchange and Gift Division. If the material is not claimed by interested institutions, it is pulped.
We are, wrote Deputy Libraria
n of Congress William Welsh in 1985, “running our cameras against the clock14 in the race to save as much as possible.”
How many institutions, as a practical matter, are going to claim books that have been cut out of their bindings? Individual citizens might want mutilated books, but they weren’t allowed to have them, according to Joanna Biggar,15 who wrote a 1984 article for The Washington Post Magazine, “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books to Save Them?” The article, by identifying a few of those three hundred thousand volumes referred to by the head of the PMO, makes clear what did and what didn’t qualify as a “unique title” in the Library’s thinking in that era.
Biggar describes an illustrated 1909 book, Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun: A Record of Pioneer Exploration and Mountaineering in the Punjab Himalaya, by an explorer named Fanny Workman. The Library of Congress guillotined and filmed it in 1975; when a researcher who had recently used the book requested the disbound remains, she was told that the library wasn’t allowed to transfer books to individuals. The Preservation Microfilming Office wouldn’t let her take even the map. Fanny Workman’s book, with its ninety-some illustrations, went to a Baltimore pulpery. Last time I checked on Bibliofind, on April 20, 2000, there were two copies of Fanny Workman’s Peaks and Glaciers of Nun Kun for sale. One, “slightly rubbed and worn” and recased with new endpapers, was going for $2,200; the other, “slightly spotted” but crisp, for $2,400.
Assuming, conservatively, that the books the Library of Congress got rid of have a replacement value of forty dollars apiece (some would be worth less, some a great deal more), and assuming (generously) that the library kept ten percent of the originals after filming them, the Preservation Microfilming Office threw out more than ten million dollars’ worth of public property between 1968 and 1984.
Spring-balanced book cradles, which hold bound books open evenly under a camera without cracking their spines, have been around since the thirties. Gutter shadow isn’t as dark and deep in books as it is in newspaper volumes, because books aren’t as thick, and their margins are usually wider. Very few of those three hundred thousand volumes would have had to be terminated in order to be “preserved,” except that the PMO’s mandate was to condense efficiently, per Verner Clapp’s cost-estimating subcontractors. A 1987 Library of Congress Discussion Document titled “Preservation Selection Decisions,” written by Ricky Erway, then of the Planning Office, includes a list of pros and cons to “keeping the material in its original format.” One of the cons is “no space savings.” If you keep the original but microfilm it in order to reduce the risk of damage to it, Erway points out, you actually provide “negative space savings.” (Meaning that you must store the boxes of microfilm, too.) Erway also writes: “To save space, it is beneficial to transfer to a new format those materials which can then be discarded or can at least be stored offsite.” The “primary solution” for brittle books, according to Erway’s paper, was “Discard original.”
In turning over this document—and it took me more than four months to extract it from the library, after I saw it mentioned in a UNESCO report on methods of library preservation—the head of the library’s Office Systems Services and Records Office wanted me to know (1) that the Library of Congress is not bound by the Freedom of Information Act,16 (2) that the report “was never shared broadly within the Library,” and (3) that its recommendations “never became Library policy.” Oh, and another thing: “The report you are requesting is not of record at the Library of Congress.” Ricky Erway herself now works at the Research Libraries Group; when I called her, she was kind enough to fax a copy of “Preservation Selection Decisions” to her former employer so that they could send it to me, since they seemed to be unable to locate it on their own. The document is, Erway says, “an artifact of its time”; when she looked it over recently, though, she thought, “Well, this seems pretty rational to me.”
A year after Erway submitted her report, the new librarian of Congress, James Billington, dropped in on the library’s Cataloging-in-Publication division, where he said a friendly hello to a publishers’ liaison named Victoria Boucher. Boucher and Billington chatted for a moment, and then she brought up what was on her mind: the library was destroying books and calling it preservation. Knowing Billington’s interests, she mentioned the loss of pre-Revolutionary Russian works in good condition. Billington seemed, as Boucher recalled afterward, “annoyed and embarrassed.” She asked him if he’d yet been into the stacks (where books had slips in them marking them for microfilming), and he said he hadn’t. When Billington left, the head of the department snapped at Boucher, “I’m glad he has you to tell him how to run a library!”
Boucher also went to the library’s European Division and protested the sacrificial microfilming; she was told that she was “preaching to the choir.” Eventually she had a talk with the head of the Preservation Microfilming Office at the time, Bohdan Yasinsky. Yasinsky reassured her, saying that people from Rare Books see the books before they are destroyed and have a chance to save them. “Quite a few people feel the way you do,” Yasinsky told Boucher. “I am known as ‘the butcher of books.’ ” The Library of Congress wasn’t really a lending library, he said, so it didn’t matter whether books remained in portable form. Boucher asked him if there had been any complaints from members of Congress (who can take books out); he said that there hadn’t been. He fixed her with a basilisk gaze, according to Boucher, and said, “They know it won’t do them any good anyway.” When I telephoned Yasinsky (who is now a Ukranian specialist at the library), he promptly confirmed the butcher-of-books epithet. There were those, he said, who were “very skeptical” when he told them that he had to cut a book in order to film it. Yasinsky attributed their unhappiness to “nostalgia.”
There have been reforms at the Library of Congress since the late 1980s. Decision trees and definitions of “serviceable” in reference to book stock have evolved considerably, I’m told—now the library supposedly keeps almost everything. Or rather, everything that has been allowed to become part of its collections; everything processed for retention, cataloged, and shelved. For, in fact, librarians reject and discard a huge mass of books that the library is given, free, by publishers every year (as the national library, the one library to have this privilege, they should be shelving everything17 they are sent); the only items that the library is required by law to store in perpetuity, oddly enough, are unpublished but formally copyrighted manuscripts. Anything published they can discard at any time. (“I am happy to announce18 that the Copyright Discard project is going very well, and all of your efforts are most appreciated,” one recent internal memo began; the question was whether a certain class of material should go in the “regular Discard tub” or the copyright-discard tub.) And the library doesn’t necessarily keep its second copies, either; one notable duplicate they deaccessioned some years ago was one of five known copies of an interim edition of Finnegans Wake19 from the twenties; the library bartered it for ten thousand dollars’ worth of fine press books.
A great research library must keep its duplicates, even its triplicates, for a number of reasons, the most basic ones being that books become worn with use, lost, stolen, or misshelved.20 (A recent survey21 of nineteenth-century American books at the Library of Congress found that “the number of Not on Shelf, misshelved, and missing books is alarming.”) Curious, I searched, on May 18, 2000, for phrases like “Surplus Library of Congress” and “Library of Congress Duplicate” on Bibliofind and turned up these: a rare printing of Henry Adams’s A Radical Indictment! (1872) for sale for $2,000; a very fragile Hebrew grammar by John Smith published in 1803, with early ownership signatures on front and rear pastedowns (and a Library of Congress duplicate release stamp on the verso of the title page), for sale for $295; Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (1979), with an introduction by Milos Forman, rubber-stamped as a Library of Congress duplicate and for sale for $500; two volumes called Chosen Kobunka Sokan by Sueji Umehara, with approximately one hundred plates and an LC surp
lus stamp, for sale for $650; an anonymous 1881 book titled Ploughed Under; the Story of an Indian Chief, written with the assistance of “Bright Eyes,” a.k.a. Susette La Flesche Tibbles, a full-blooded Omaha Indian, stamped “Library of Congress Surplus Duplicate” and spine-labeled “Reserve Storage Collection,” for sale for $450; a children’s book from 1861 by Jane Andrews called The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air, with eight illustrations (described as “a Library of Congress duplicate surplus”), for sale for $150; an 1831 edition of The Federalist, on the New Constitution, by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, with a duplicate stamp on the first flyleaf, for sale for $400; E. H. Barton’s Cause and Prevention of Yellow Fever, inscribed by the author to the Smithsonian Library in October 1858, with a Library of Congress release stamp on the first flyleaf, for sale for $450; and a book called The Army of the Potomac by Major General George McClellan, published in 1863, inscribed by McClellan to “His Excellency, General Count von Moltke, Chief of Staff etc etc with the sincere respect of George McClellan, Jun/69,” with a Library of Congress duplicate stamp on the copyright page, for sale for $12,500.
The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, requires federal agencies to disclose to the public, and to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, any plans that would affect districts, sites, buildings, or “objects” that are on the National Register of Historic Sites or that meet the register’s criteria for inclusion. One of the criteria is that the building or object has “yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history.” No better description of a library collection could be had, and yet nobody as far as I know has tried to apply this law to the Library of Congress’s collection (although the library’s Jefferson building is on the National Register); no other law sets limits on what the library can or can’t do to, say, its surviving newspapers, or to its decks of books and periodicals. If the library’s management wanted to reduce their original holdings by one third over the next several years, they could do so without holding a single public hearing; and the library has not in the past felt any obligation to alert the public to what they are planning to micro-mutilate or to sell off. It is a strangely secretive place, underscrutinized by comparison with other federal bureaucracies, its maladministration undetected by virtue of its reputation as an ark of culture. The library has gone astray partly because we trusted the librarians so completely.
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