[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Fold and cut



A number of posts back Daniel Sokolov referred to the US News & World Report
article in which the Library of Congress said that it no longer uses the fold
test.  Here's what I was going on: the Library of Congress's Kenneth Harris gave
a slide show at a conference last year called "Deacidification Revisited," held
at the National Archives.  One slide was a photograph of the fold test being
performed; the Library's variant, according to Harris, was to test whether the
book survived three half folds.  It's good to hear that the Library of Congress
has suddenly abandoned the practice--but the decision was recent.  In any case,
the fold test is still very much a part of library lore around the country, and
that is the point I was making in that chapter of the book.

As for guillotining--AS I SAY IN THE BOOK, the massive, indiscriminate
spine-shearing of books in the name of preservation crested about 1993.  It is
an episode from the very recent past.  How did it come about and what can we
learn from it?--those are some of the things my book is asking.  Nowadays
libraries do a lot less cutting--there were conservators and librarians and
people like Thomas Tanselle who were very troubled by what was going on when
Patricia Battin was in the ascendant, and they finally had an effect.  Some
universities still guillotine, though--all you have to do is check the box on
the slip in the book that says "OK to cut" before you send it to the filmer and
allow the filmer to make the decision.  It should not be happening at all.  And
most of the microfilming is totally unnecessary anyway--it's just that the NEH
is still geared up to pay for it.  The ARL's preservation statistics don't
reveal how many books survive their "preservation"; they ought to, since that
figure, in a way, the most important statistic.

And old newspaper volumes?  Still guillotined and tossed out en masse,
routinely, the activity paid for by the NEH.  This loss continues.  Journal
sets?  Often cut.  Books that are "preservation photocopied"?  Often cut.  And
it makes sense to talk about all this now because book scanning projects
disbind.  In the Making of America program, the University of Michigan and
Cornell have needlessly sacrificed lots of old (and out of copyright) books
while talking ponderously about "preservation" when in fact many of the books
they had chopped had already been microfilmed.  Anne Kenney told me that the
books that Cornell chopped were "brittle," of course.  I asked her how Cornell
determined brittleness.  The double fold test, she said.  And JSTOR guillotines
and throws out the things it scans, its stated aim to help libraries save
space.  The Library of Congress has a much better record in the case of digital
scanning than they do in microfilming--they have prudently used single sheet
items, mostly, for American Memory--and while they did disbind and scan the Walt
Whitman notebooks it was part of conservation activity.

Wouldn't it be nice if we learned from what happened with microfilm in the 20th
century, and this time around didn't allow a new and very useful technology--in
this case flatbed scanning--to force the waste of old (and incidentally out of
copyright) volumes?  A little patience is in order: we just have to wait until
overhead digital cameras get better and do the nondestructive scanning more
slowly.  And finally, the fact that one library gets a grant to make a copy (a
microfilm or a digital copy) shouldn't induce other libraries to discard their
own original copies of that book--that false economy is what the Brittle Books
Program was built on and it is behind the Michael Lesk scan-and-dump model of
digital libraries.

Nicholson Baker
(PS Thanks to all list members for the interesting comments--and thanks
especially to those who read the book before commenting on it.)

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

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