For some years, Cornell’s Anne Kenney has been a leader of the scan clan. She knows (as she told the attendees at a Mellon Foundation-sponsored conference in 1997) that “the costs of selecting, converting, and making digital information available can be staggering.” Since it is so horribly expensive, she believes that the only way libraries will be able to pay for it is if “digital collections can alleviate2 the need to support full traditional libraries at the local level.” Therefore, over the past decade, in its various grant-funded scanning projects, Cornell University has snarfed its way through a banquet of old material, employing the language of earnest preservationism whenever it was expedient. (The books are “deteriorating,” “rapidly self-destructing,”3 etc.) They have disbound a collection of what are in some cases extremely rare math books6 of a century ago (and printed up germ-free facsimiles7 of them on a Xerox DocuTech printer), and books on Peruvian guano8 and butterflies and forestry. The paper facsimiles are a way of easing the transition to the digital library: “Conceivably, this may at some point allow librarians to propose other service alternatives as a substitute for traditional shelf storage,” says a footnote to the report—meaning that to use a book, you would have it printed out on demand or you would read it on-screen. Of course, if the book had to be printed out, there was an opportunity to generate a little revenue, too: “There may also be opportunities9 to underwrite some of the costs of preservation through the sale of facsimile editions.”
A few years later, Cornell got Mellon money to scan original runs of nineteenth-century American magazines like Scribner’s, Scientific American, Harper’s, and Atlantic Monthly. A wonderful nineteenth-century monthly magazine, replete with many hundreds of engravings, called The Manufacturer and Builder (already microfilmed in 1989 by the Northeast Document Conservation Center), was unmade by Cornell as one of its contributions to the digital Making of America project. (The Making of America was conceived by Stuart Lynn and others at Cornell in part to alleviate the problem of the “escalating cost of storage10 and the lack of adjacent building space.”) Ah, but it’s searchable, you may say, and neither the microfilm nor the original issues are: it’s worth destroying an illustrated run of The Manufacturer and Builder to get a fully searchable copy of it up on the Web. Yes, it is searchable, but because the type of the original is small and the resolution of the scanning is only six hundred dots per inch, the image-processing software doesn’t have enough information to chew on. As a result, while the images Cornell offers are legible, the OCR text available for your searches sometimes speaks in a language entirely its own. Here, for example, is Cornell’s searchable text of the beginning of an 1883 article about a subterranean convulsion11 in Java:
As intimated in our editomial remnarks last month, the gm-eat suibtermanean convumision imi, Java gmoxvs mom-c appalling as time facts relating to it become better kumouvum, antI time meal magnitude of time tlisturbance can be mucasumably compiehended.
“It xviii be unnecessamy,” the writer continues, “for us to enter into further details of time catastrophic, save to remark that all we mepouted of time changes in time configumation of time hind lmadi time suiruounding ocemun bottom, has beemi comifimmed, amid much mom-c extensive changes noticed.” An explanatory note about viewing the plain text derived from Making of America page-images says that “OCR accuracy is high12 but varies from page-to-page depending on a number of variables”; the note blames the errors on the “brittle, faded, and foxed” originals, saying that proofreading “would be very expensive and time consuming.” A production note preceding the OCR text says that Cornell did the work in order “to preserve the informational content13 of the deteriorated original.” The “best available copy” of the original was used, of course. The originals were disbound, we learn elsewhere, “due to the brittle nature14 of many of the items.” I asked Anne Kenney how the library determined brittleness; she said they used the double-fold test. “I’m not as wedded to retaining, at each site, the original sources as some may be,” she said.
It’s extremely kind of Cornell’s librarians to put these images on the Web, and one can’t blame them for the untutoredness of their OCR software (which despite its sometimes garbled output unquestionably helps researchers in their truffle hunting15), but it’s truly a shame, after the decades of havoc wrought by microfilming, that pages bearing such a wealth of engravings are once again needlessly dying to feed the sausage factory. The faculty and students of Cornell were not asked whether they wanted valuable runs of nineteenth-century magazines sacrificed for this experiment. “These things were never aired out in a public forum,” says Joel Silbey, a Cornell historian who served on an advisory board to the library. “I was stunned when I first heard that they would have to disembowel the things.” He began to “express consternation.” The response of Anne Kenney and her colleagues was, according to Silbey, that “this was the only way it could be done and that it had to be done or we would lose things.” Which is a curious rationale, since the intellectual content of The Manufacturer and Builder, along with many other Making of America titles, was already backed up on microfilm when Cornell began their work—the emergency last-ditch “rescue” of this supposedly at-risk title had already happened. After some discussion, several of the disbound runs were sent to Rare Books, where they are or will be boxed. It was too late for The Manufacturer and Builder, though.
So the machine-induced loss begins all over again. But it can be stopped: there is no reason why one medium must mandatorily stab another one in the back. John Warnock, head of Adobe Software and a book collector of catholic tastes and deep pockets, discovered that he could create extremely fine-grained, full-color electronic copies of his own antiquarian books, using an overhead camera with a four-by-five-inch digital camera-back, without doing anything to them more injurious than turning their pages. He founded Octavo Corporation, which has published searchable facsimiles of early editions of Robert Hooke, William Harvey, Franklin, Galileo, Newton, and Copernicus; Octavo recently finished photographing one of the Folger Library’s First Folio editions of Shakespeare. It takes several minutes for the array of sensors in the camera to process the detail in one double-page spread, each of which consumes one hundred and forty megabytes of storage; the resulting scans have a serene luminosity and depth of detail. I described to Warnock the Cornell project of digitizing and throwing away rare nineteenth-century math books and replacing them with black-and-white printouts at six hundred dots per inch. “I have no sympathy with that, I’m afraid,” Warnock said.
At some point, maybe not so long from now, a company such as Octavo may want to scan a volume of newspapers, at high resolution, nondestructively, as if it were a fragile sixteenth-century folio. The president of the company will make inquiries at a library or historical society in his city. He will be led into a room that holds four hundred gray cabinets of microfilm. “But we need the originals,” the company president will say. “Where are the originals?”
CHAPTER 36
* * *
Honest Disagreement
On September 29, 1999, President Clinton gave Patricia Battin a National Medal for the Humanities. “Patricia Battin is saving history,” Clinton said at the ceremony. “The high acidic content of paper threatens to destroy millions of old books, but she has led the national campaign to raise awareness about this challenge and preserve the genius of the past.” Clinton described Battin’s efforts to “transfer information from so-called ‘brittle books’ to microfilm and optical disks.” More than 770,000 books have “already been preserved,” Clinton said. He ended: “Thank you for saving the knowledge of the past for the children of tomorrow.”
Since Battin began campaigning for the cause in 1987, the National Endowment for the Humanities has given away more than $115 million to libraries for microfilming—seventy-some million dollars for books in addition to the forty-five million assigned to the participants in the U.S. Newspaper Program. “I think the NEH newspaper program is incredible,” Batti
n said to me. “We have access to resources that we would never have if they had been left alone. I think we will have the same with the Brittle Books Program.” The reason that the newspapers were thrown away after they were filmed, Battin explained to me, was that “they were crumbling during the process—I mean, they were breaking and everything during the process of filming them.”
No. Even if things did instantly crumble after their final farewell wave of photographic transubstantiation—and they don’t—that would explain only the discarding of those newspapers that were actually filmed, and not the practically universal dumpage of the same runs at other libraries. I suggested to her that microfilm also saves space.
“But I don’t think that saving space was the issue,” Battin remarkably replied. “Not ever in my experience. I would say we all went into microfilming with great reluctance.”
When Battin was head of Columbia’s libraries, one of her senior colleagues was Pamela Darling. Darling was a cheerfully unrepentant thrower-outer. “Think about space costs,”1 she argued in Microform Review: if a library was to replace half of its volumes with microfilm, “existing shelf space would last almost twice as long.” Darling advised readers of Library Journal to “keep re-examining2 your librarian’s hoarding instinct.” If you don’t really want something enough to pay for its repair, then
get rid of it! Give it to another library if it needs it and can care for it; sell it to a collector or dealer if there are enough pieces left to sell; or—horror of horrors—put it in the trash can.
If we don’t start throwing things out, Darling insisted, “the central stacks of all major libraries will soon be condemned as unsanitary landfill—the world’s intellectual garbage dumps.” Darling was the head of Columbia’s preservation department when she wrote these words. Later she was a special consultant3 for Peter Sparks’s National Preservation Program Office; the National Endowment for the Humanities paid her to develop training programs and a self-study manual4 for preservation planning.
Battin herself was of the opinion that it “may well be cheaper5 to support access than large real estate holdings and service personnel to house and manage rapidly growing collections of artifacts.” And yet to me she said, in the sincerest possible voice, “I don’t think it’s your librarians that have ever tried to miniaturize in order to save space. I think it hurt most of us as much as it did any scholar to have to make these decisions, but we had the responsibility.” Later, however, when I asked her directly why a given book couldn’t just resume its former place in a library’s collection after it was “preserved,” she said that “you have to look at the cost of maintaining this on the shelf.” Then she seemed to sense a self-contradiction; she said: “And in that regard, space does become a factor in making the decision. But it is not the factor that led one to microfilm in the first place. I think that’s very important, to make that distinction.”
I asked her about Thomas Tanselle’s proposal to store any post-preservational rejects in a publicly financed repository. “Tom has presented this to me in public meetings before,” Battin said. “And I don’t think the economics have been worked out.” (She and her colleagues managed to work out the economics of a hundred million dollars’ worth of microfilming; surely figuring out how to devote ten million dollars to the foundation of a national repository is not beyond their talents.) Tanselle, she said, “represents a fairly small group of scholars for whom this is a very passionate issue. I think the vast number of scholars would rather have the access that we were trying to provide.”
And what access is that? How has the Brittle Books Program furthered access to anything? In the case of newspapers on film, you can mail around the spools, which is a convenience, since the newspaper volumes themselves (if they haven’t been scrapped) must as a rule stay on site. But books are portable and parcel-postable. Columbia University, alone among world libraries, owns a microfilm copy of Francis de Croisset’s memoir of Robert de Flers, which it once owned in the original. I now own the original, because Pamela Darling, or someone at Columbia’s preservation department, gave it to Patricia Battin, who gave it to me. In 1985, everyone at Columbia had access to the original book; now I do. (Columbia can have the book back anytime.)
“Access,” as employed by practicing retrievalists, does not mean physical access. The ability to summon words from distant, normally unreachable sources, which can be a fine thing for scholarship, is being linked to the compulsory removal of local physical access, which is a terrible thing for scholarship. Battin wrote once that “the value, in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” No wonder scholars like Thomas Tanselle opposed her: she was determined to make it more difficult for them to do their work.
“We have differed from the very beginning,” Battin says of Tanselle. “It’s just an honest disagreement.”
Speaking of honesty, late in our conversation I asked Battin what the thinking was behind the idea that books were “turning to dust.”
She looked puzzled. “I guess I don’t understand,” she said. “They were. Are you thinking it’s hyperbole?”
I said I didn’t know quite what the phrase meant.
“Basically what we meant was they were crumbling,” Battin explained. “I think we used ‘crumbling.’ ‘Crumbling books’ was what I remember much more that we used rather than ‘turning to dust.’ ”
In 1995, in testimony offered to Congress on behalf of the Association of Research Libraries, the Commission on Preservation and Access, and the National Humanities Alliance, Battin said, without qualification, that before 1988 (that is, before “the massive salvation effort” of the full-scale brittle-books initiative) “millions of books6 were crumbling and turning to dust on shelves in libraries and archives. . . . Surveys confirmed that nearly 80 million books were threatened with such destruction.”
I brought up Peter Waters and his question of whether any library anywhere had a substantial inventory of losses caused by brittle books crumbling to dust. In response, Battin patted the marbled boards of Croisset’s memoir. “This was withdrawn,” she explained. “That’s what we did. That’s our inventory—what’s been withdrawn.”
The book she had given me—its pages quite intact well over a decade after the microfilming company disbound it—qualified as an example of a book that was crumbling to dust? Had she possibly exaggerated somewhat?
“I don’t think the statistics were exaggerated,” Battin answered carefully. She said that Sidney Yates, the congressman, used to call her up saying “I need to know this and I need to know that.” Battin finally told him, “We’ve got the best information we can get. We can either wait ten years, and do careful counts, and lose more, or we can go on with these figures.” In other words, it’s an emergency because our statistics tell us so, and we have to go with the statistics that confirm that it is an emergency because since it is an emergency we have no time to waste gathering other statistics that might indicate that it isn’t an emergency, so please give us seventeen million dollars right now.
Battin finally said to me: “You probably are quite right that ‘turning to dust’ may well be hyperbole, as a way to catch the imagination of people.”
CHAPTER 37
* * *
We Just Kind of Keep Track
I, obviously, have a different view of the Brittle Books Program and the U.S. Newspaper Program than Patricia Battin does. The Newspaper Program, in particular, has, in my opinion, drained beauty and color and meaning from the landscape of the knowable past in ways that are reminiscent of what happened to the English countryside as a result of the government-financed destruction of the hedgerows in the fifties and sixties—and runs of daily newspapers, unlike rows of hawthorns, can’t be replanted. But after more than a year of interviewing librarians, I am aware that many of them don’t agree with me (although some do). I talked to Robert Dowd, who coordinates a subset of the Newspaper Program out of an office at the New Yor
k State Library in Albany. Dowd said: “There are cases of course when we are going to find the microfilm, it is not any good, and the papers from which the microfilm is produced are gone, because they were disposed of, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about that.”
We have, I said to Dowd, lost intellectual content as a direct result of our massive effort to preserve it.
“I’m not going to disagree with you,” Dowd replied. “It’s absolutely true, we have, and it’s unfortunate. What’s the other option, we don’t try? That’s obviously not the way to go.”
But that is the way to go. When trying does far more harm than not trying, don’t try. Go slow. Keep what you have.
“Unless someone sits down with the papers to be considered for disposal, and compares issue by issue, perhaps even page by page,” there is no way to be sure that issues aren’t being lost, Dowd said.
Since that isn’t happening, I said, the conclusion we must draw, artifactuality aside, is that we have to hold on to the originals.
“Somewhere in the back of my mind I absolutely agree with you,” Dowd replied. He told me about some of the New York State Library’s volumes of a Buffalo paper that he has saved because, even though there is ostensibly complete microfilm, he happens to know that there are things in the volumes that the microfilm copy lacks.
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