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Re: Nicholson Baker and NEH



Not so coincidentally, i just addressed the issue of color microfilm in a
paper for a class on the history of information. While Henry Wilhelm
considers the top-quality color microfilm actually superior to
black-and-white, few people are using it because it is very expensive--about
10 times more than black-and-white.

I did an informal survey of some of the newspapers known for their use of
color (St. Petersburg Times, USA Today, etc.) and found that none of them
save their papers on color microfilm. Nor do they save the originals for
more than a few years. USA Today does, however, save PDF versions of every
page.

Daria Labinsky
Graduate student
Emporia State University-NM


----- Original Message -----
From: Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer <c_crawfo@CULINARY.EDU>
To: <ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: Nicholson Baker and NEH


It's too bad Mr. Baker doesn't seem to understand what the US Newspaper
Program is doing. In a previous life, I worked for the agency that hosted
the New York Newspaper Project person for our eight counties of New York,
and I served as liaison between him and the agency, and learned a lot about
the project. The USNP works to locate copies of little-known papers that
might otherwise be lost to history--in people's attics and barns, and, one
way or another, to make those copies available for research purposes. They
don't have the budget to microfilm everything, and the USNP microfilms
papers and then returns them to the repository (or barn or whatever) that
they came from. They don't have a policy of automatically destroying papers
after they film them.

In the midst of all this, no one has mentioned the possibility of using
color microfilm. I'm not sure I've ever seen any, but I know it exists
because a while back Playboy was filmed on color microfilm so as not to lose
the --um--charms--it displayed in full living color. Unfortunately, it
turned out that the microfilm frames were exactly the same size as 35mm
slides, and some people who caught on to this were snipping frames out of
the microfilm in libraries....






Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(845) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

>>> "Roberts, Janet" <Janet.Roberts@STATE.ME.US> 04/13/01 08:41AM >>>
Yes Nicholson Baker knows about the NEH US Newspaper Project, and would kill
it if he could.  In his New Yorker article, he said "not since the
monk-harassments of sixteenth-century England has a government tolerated,
indeed stimulated, the methodical eradication of so much primary source
material."  Mr. Baker has never been one to shy away from an overstatement.
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