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Re: Paper Conspiracy



 Baker is well known to the library community for two articles, neither of
which can I give citations for at the moment. The first appeared in
Harpers I believe a number of years ago and mourned the loss of the old
card catalog in libraries. He pointed out ( rightly so ) that much
information that existed on the cards in old library card catalogs
vanished in the migration to OPACS, notes made by library staff over
the years, etc. You could probably debate for days the value of the
information on the cards vs. the space and upkeep vs. the ease of use of
OPACS.

 The second Baker article dealt with the migration of long runs of turn of
the century magazines and journals into microfilm, and the resulting loss
of beautiful illustrations, etc. Standard microfilm simply cannot compete
with the real paper copy in this case. Hard to argue that. I think that
what happened is that a typical library would do this thinking that
"somebody else will keep the hard copy" and it seems in some cases nobody
did.

 Unfortunate? Yes. A conspiracy? No. That would require an organized
thought process ...


 Steve Fisher
 University of Denver

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