This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  This was the plan: sportswriter Jeremy Schaap would be flying down to Florida for the Super Bowl and would swing by Kaplan’s home in suburban Miami and shoot some footage. Then the group would have Kaplan’s voice and presence and shots of some of his treasures—not to mention pictures of this house and garage stuffed to the rafters—to show potential investors. They particularly wanted to approach Robert De Niro, who won an Academy Award playing the boxer Jake LaMotta. When Schaap had to back out of the trip, Cucchiara stepped in. He flew to Miami in the spring of 2007, on his own dime, and shot three hours of footage for a short documentary on Hank Kaplan, The Lord of the Ring.

  But before he and the others could approach De Niro or anyone else, Kaplan’s health began to fail. Early in December, Cucchiara got a call from Kaplan’s daughter. The eighty-eight-year-old boxing historian was dying, but he wanted Cucchiara to know that the collection would be his. The public announcement appeared at the end of the appreciative and moving obituary of Kaplan that appeared in the Washington Post: the archives’ next home would be Brooklyn College.

  Forget the $300,000. All Cucchiara had to do was raise $10,000 to have an archival mover transfer the precious papers and photographs from Miami to Brooklyn.

  It was probably just as well the group didn’t get around to asking for De Niro’s help. Kaplan had been a boxing writer as well as a collector, and he had blasted Raging Bull when it came out. “A lingering question as I exited the theater was why Robert De Niro, a great actor, to be sure, studied for so long the boxing style and technique of Jake LaMotta, only to depict a boxer so unlike the Bronx Bull that to identify him would be impossible”—after which Kaplan had given a short and authoritative lesson in why LaMotta had been so great and why we should care that someone got it wrong.

  Kaplan had not been trained formally in the archival arts, though he had taught himself some skills, but he had been a biologist before he retired; he knew how to structure things. Still, the collection he assembled had been kept for decades in a frame house and garage in the hurricane belt, and Hurricane Andrew had torn the roof off in the early nineties. The house was unguarded for two months after Kaplan died, and his obituaries referred to his collection as “priceless.” In fact, it was worth far more than the original asking price; it was appraised for $2.94 million. That thieves didn’t get there before the moving van was another miracle. “Just by the grace of God, really, did this collection survive,” Cucchiara marveled.

  Certainly serendipity and luck were at play in this story. What if a hurricane had torn off not just the roof but the rest of the building, too? What if the librarian reading the newspaper hadn’t turned the page? What if Cucchiara had not gone to Miami himself to meet Kaplan? What if a sports memorabilia seller had swooped in, bought the lot, and held an auction? What if the moving van had crashed? But you could make yourself crazy thinking like that. What if Hank Kaplan had suffered brain damage in his single pro fight, and reading made him dizzy, and he had never collected a scrap?

  What endures, if luck endured with it, was something real and true, a history of a primal sport across time and cultures, vivid with stories. And the key element, the most important by far, was the last what if: What if one person hadn’t bothered to keep all this in the first place? Because without that keeper, the rest hardly mattered.

  Digital Scraps

  Hank Kaplan lived in a simpler world, archivally speaking. Every night, he sat down and cut up the newspapers and filed photographs and wrote ten or twelve letters to correspondents around the world, exchanging boxing news and trading artifacts. He received so many letters, that he began throwing them away, unless they came from Muhammad Ali or Angelo Dundee, the legendary cornerman. He still managed to collect a massive amount of paper, but he never got into computers; he didn’t have shirt boxes full of floppy discs.

  What about the Hank Kaplans of today?

  What if I had something I wanted to capture from the Web—a snapshot of every headline that ran the day a baby was born; or a file of every photo of Salma Hayek, to see how often she smiled. Or maybe I wanted to collect stories about viruses that spread like viruses. How would I collect them all? What if I wanted to be like Hank Kaplan and document, say, the winners and the losers of American Idol, instead of boxing matches? Or, more likely, what if I wanted to save the spontaneous outpourings and arias of grief posted in the wake of a tragic event—the Virginia Tech massacre, or the sudden death of an admired writer. How could I save such stories for myself and others? How could I save them, and organize them, so they were useful into the future?

  I had learned the hard way that saving links wasn’t good enough; they led to “Page Error” as often as not, to places where places on the Web used to be. The librarian who had first shown me how to make screenshots had opened up a world for me, but before long, I had a desktop cluttered with screenshots. I didn’t know how to arrange them—by date? subject? author? Should I keep the blog posts separate from the work in quality publications like Newsweek? Then where would I put Newsweek’s blogs? When I tried to share the screenshots via e-mail, other people couldn’t open them unless they were using the same browser I did. I was making a noble effort, but it was mostly useless. That wasn’t the idea.

  I studied books about digital archives. It was hard to concentrate on them, so I started reading them on the treadmill. This had the advantage of preventing me from making a lot of notes and clutter, while keeping oxygen flowing to my brain. The books were as weighty as manuals, and, like websites that lead only to more websites, free of simple, readable content; their pages were all about principles of organization, arranged in bullet style, like PowerPoint presentations, only longer. But I could never find anything that told me what I personally could do about the looming nightmare of lost digital data, besides make a lot of copies in a lot of different formats. I couldn’t find a Dummies book for amateur digital archivists.

  I tacked questions at the back of every interview—how could I personally create a digital archive? The librarians and archivists I consulted were all terribly concerned about the burgeoning Web, pages disappearing from sites shutting down, the threat of data corruption, and censorship. Everyone knew stories of old blogs or photograph collections disappearing—everybody heard a whoosh in the air. “We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs,” one blogger wrote after the disappearance of another clutch of social-networking sites. How could I capture even a few specks of this data? I wanted to reach my hand into the speeding, spinning ether of the Internet and pluck out pages, and save them in an elegant format that would be useful in time.

  The digital librarian Brewster Kahle had looked at the Internet in 1994 and thought, Somebody ought to save this stuff. Kahle put up his own money and formed the Internet Archive, and he has been crawling the Web ever since with his team of archivists, taking snapshots as fast as the technology permits. (If someone objects on copyright grounds, the Internet Archive simply removes the page.) Now anyone can go to archive.org, and find billions of old webpages on its “Wayback Machine”—not everything, not by a long shot, but such a tremendous file, it can be searched only by Web address. You can’t type in living Mouseketeers and see that slice of history. You can, however, type in amazon.com and see snapshots of a page from 1998, evidence of how very long ago 1998 was ($100 rebate for buying a magenta-pink RAZR phone). “Internet libraries can change the content of the Internet from ephemera to enduring artifacts of our political and cultural lives,” the archive declares.

  It is a fantastic resource, and Kahle had stepped in while libraries and museums dawdled. But you couldn’t (yet) use it to build a digital archive of bloodied-up boxers or young writers’ tributes to John Updike. And what will the future be missing if the present doesn’t have a Hank Kaplan here and there, squirreling away the scr
aps of his or her particular obsession?

  As it happened, I had a source who had helped develop a prototype for a free, do-it-yourself, Web archiving tool. “How do you collect stuff on the Web so that it’s useful down the road?” Josh Greenberg of the New York Public Library did not have to puzzle this out for a second. Before this job, Greenberg had been working at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, where he helped develop a prototype of the free Firefox extension Zotero. It would save a snapshot of any webpage I wanted, and all sorts of other information, as well. “Say you’re on Amazon looking for a book,” Greenberg explained. “One way of remembering that book would be, jot down the title. Another way would be, type all the information about it—the title, author, publisher, and so on—into a bibliographic program. But it turns out, we can grab that data automatically if we are crafty about how we get it. In Zotero, you go to an Amazon page and a little icon pops up in the menu bar that looks like a book. You click it and it pulls in all the information about that book that Amazon has. It’s spectacular.” Bingo—Archives for Dummies!

  Amateurs and enthusiasts like me have a lot to contribute, Greenberg added; we’re witnessing and sometimes even shaping history. In fact, if Greenberg ever gets a chance to catch his breath, he’s going to write a book about the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts who end up contributing their expertise and more to our culture.

  “It needs to be as easy to set up an online archive as it is to set up a blog,” he said, and suddenly, all over town, bells tolled and horns honked and even the pigeons sang. Such a simple, lucid summary of my search. Like the best librarians and archivists, Greenberg had shown me how to figure out what I wanted to do, then pointed me toward the answer. I wanted to keep something from the Web that I could find again later. I wanted to keep what I read there alive.

  Josh Greenberg’s work at George Mason had been part of an initiative funded by the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation called Exploring and Collecting History Online. “We were building websites to collect stories. The first major success was the project called the September 11th Digital Archive. Within weeks of 9/11, my colleague, Dan Cohen, set up a site that asked people for their stories or their photographs. People uploaded all sorts of stuff. One of my favorites was the chart of a guy’s heart rate; he happened to be jogging across the Brooklyn Bridge and had his heart monitor on. You actually see these two spikes. It’s an amazing visual artifact.”

  After the team gathered all these items, it donated the lot to the Library of Congress, where the staff has been working on digital archives since 1994. One of the library’s digital conversion specialists, Liz Madden, wrote that they took on this project because it “provided a practical, real-world example of what digital donations might look like in the future.” The staff figured out how to catalog it, and now the September 11th Digital Archive—snapshots of newspapers, emergency websites, personal letters and photos, and even the stress test, the stuff of our history, the first born-digital collection at the Library of Congress—lives on the Web.

  The Library of Congress made another foray into digital history when it began an experiment with Flickr in 2008, posting a fraction of the million digitized photographs in its archives on that network and inviting the public to help identify the images. The Library of Congress/Flickr project was, from the beginning, a great success, attracting attention to the library’s archives and leveraging the knowledge of the public in the freewheeling style of the Web; more than 3 million views were counted the first week alone. The tone on the library’s blog was jubilant: “nothing short of astounding. You always hope for a positive reaction to something like this, but it has been utterly off the charts.” Facts, memories, found photographers, long discussions about why hay bales are different shapes in different parts of the country, and a tremendous amount of goodwill have been generated by the project. One of the factors in its success, according to the library’s final report, was due to the fact that “A venerable institution like the Library of Congress participating (and seemingly conversant) in a popular Web 2.0 space was unexpected and attracted attention.”

  The Library of Congress had taken some of its archives into the world, preserved them in new ways, and given them new life in the shared space of the commons. Immeasurable free publicity and free research help were the result. Not even one full-time worker had been budgeted and the cost of the library’s Flickr Pro account was $24.95 a year. It was not much more than a Library 2.0 vision, pure and simple: Spread the gold, and trust the reader.

  12.

  THE BEST DAY

  I was under the librarians’ protection.

  Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back.

  I approached the opening of the new Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut, not as an outsider who lived forty-five minutes away but as a welcome guest. Here was a public library that flung open its doors to people from beyond the town limits. A banner quote emblazoned its home page for a while—“I live in California, but I keep Darien Library’s number in my phone for good answers to my questions.” Imagine that!

  It’s true that without a Darien library card, I couldn’t actually check out the laptops and GPS devices and Kindles available to local patrons. I couldn’t take BlackBerry boot camp (what a shame). Nor could I read the Wall Street Journal online (database access is restricted by the providers)—though I could become a friend of their library for $300 and enjoy any and all of these privileges. Even as a mere piker and carpetbagger, I was invited to register on their website and help myself to resources like podcast interviews with authors and staff-written reviews. And, most important, I was invited to consult their librarians. About anything! Their librarians would be happy to work for me. Any person in the universe can consult Darien’s Ask a Librarian using the instant-messaging service, Meebo, on the library’s website. It told you if the library was online, and warned you it might take a little while; but the weekend it opened, when the library was packed with hundreds of people, I tried this after I returned home and a librarian sent me the text of an article from the Darien paper in fifteen minutes. “We’re always thinking SERVICE,” the website proclaimed. Reader, I was serviced.

  This friendly embrace of anyone who walked through the door—or called, or used the instant-message service—was the mark of an evolved library. “The time soon will come when the idea of defining the clientele a library serves in very narrow, often geographically constrained terms will seem very quaint and old-fashioned,” librarian Tom Peters wrote in a blog for the American Library Association. “Usage of information and information services has been going global since global information networks became widely used.” His modest suggestion: “Perhaps a few forward-thinking library staffers, with the full support of their boards and their currently defined clientele, should openly declare that they serve the entire world, at least in theory.” At least in theory. Is there any harm in that? In practice, we already see that all over the Web. And public libraries do, after all, hang signs that say “public.”

  The library blogs had been buzzing about Darien’s opening for months. The Darien site itself had a countdown clock keeping track of the hours, minutes, even seconds till the new library opened. Michael Stephens and others had been beating the drum about the library’s innovations and generosity in sharing them. John Blyberg, assistant director for innovation and user experience for the library, had been posting time-lapse videos of the construction, bragging about the new surface-mounted computer they were installing in the children’s room that fit into a tabletop and had a touch screen. He also unveiled on the webpage a sweet, simple interface with their catalog, one that allowed patrons to add their own tags to the catalog (book club possibility, for instance, or social studies extra credit). The next time the patrons used the catalog, they could log in, type in book club possibility, and everything they marked with that tag would pop up.

  I’d caught the anticipation and wanted to be there for the opening, but because
of a glitch on their website, the old address floated on the bottom of the page with a MapQuest link to the old library. Fortunately, I found the new site on Post Road, a few blocks away, in time. I recognized the new building: red brick and glass, standing between life, in the form of a greenhouse, on one side, and death, a veterans’ cemetery, on the other—rows of headstones standing guard from the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and the World War, as the headstones read, meaning the first.

  Minutes before ten, according to the big clock on the tower that rose in the middle of the building, a janitor swept the sidewalk under a blue ribbon stretched across the entrance. The 130 parking places in the back of the new library had been filled. Two policemen in knit caps and reflective gloves and vests stood by the entrance, prepared to direct the overflow. The place still had a raw construction feeling, with a pile of stones under tarp and visible edges on the squares of sod. Thirty degrees; the threat of snow was in the air this Saturday morning, January 10, 2009; nothing but bleak news from the front page to the weather forecast and the business news, especially in Darien, which BusinessWeek predicted would be the U.S. town hardest hit by the economic downturn.