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Re: Paper Conspiracy



The article on card catalogs is:

Baker, N. (1994, April 4). Discards. The New Yorker, 64-86.

He also wrote a controversial article about the renovation of the San
Francisco Public Library that also appeared in the New Yorker, but I can't
find the citation at hand.

Some might consider Baker an extremist but he brings up points I think all
archivists should consider re the actual vs. the claimed longevity of
materials. And as Steve Fisher points out, everyone assumes that "somebody
else will keep the hard copy," and a lot of times no one does.

Baker will be at this year's ALA conference in San Francisco, Sunday, June
17, sponsored by the Progressive Library Association.

Daria Labinsky
Emporia State University/NM





----- Original Message -----
From: STEVEN P. FISHER <sfisher@DU.EDU>
To: <ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 10:30 AM
Subject: 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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>

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

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Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>