I strongly take your point about eleventy zillion copies of the New York Times. I often read old books and the list of "hit novels from 1911 that nobody would possibly be interested in today" where you get the publisher's advertisement for "our forthcoming novels by Charles B. Whosis and Cecily Whatte-Herr, author of "Tilly's Trottings" and "The Risqué Rake Rebuffed" are fascinating glimpses into the past, but I somehow doubt that it is easy to find a copy of them - not because sinister librarians cackled as they ran them through a shredder and dumped the pathetic remnants in the dustbin, but because they were popular hits of their day and within ten years nobody cared about them. The equivalent of the back-catalogue of Mills & Boon or Harlequin Romances.
On the other hand, places like Project Gutenberg which *have* put up digital copies of old and hard-to-get books are a godsend to me (as was Amazon in its early days - the thrill of finally being able to order a copy of a book that I had been unsuccessfully trawling second-hand bookshops in vain to get!). Yes, I'd love to have a paper copy of such-and-such a work, but if I can't get it any other way than online, then I'm happy to get it that way, rather than languish in the knowledge that there *might* be a copy on some library shelf in another country.
This was surprisingly fascinating! The closest I've come to contacting this issue myself was that UC Berkeley required me to submit my dissertation on archival quality paper, but I think all years since mine (2008) have been allowed to submit electronically. I'm pretty sure someone is still producing an archival quality hard copy from those electronic submissions.
This is the one thing that makes me a bit hesitant to suggest that academic journals should switch to low-cost all-electronic open-access formats.
I knew there was something wrong with Baker's thesis when I read the book on its first coming out. Because when I was in library school in 1980, twenty years earlier, we were told that discarding the originals after microfilming them was a bad old idea that wasn't being done any more. Microfilming was for improving access (you can make copies of the microfilm and send them anywhere), not for preservation. De-acidification was the coming thing for preservation, at least then.
Baker also thoroughly misunderstands the double-fold test. He says that if you don't want the paper to break, just don't fold it that way. The idea of the double-fold test is as an early warning system, like the canary in the coal mine. It tells you which paper is most brittle and most needs attention.
That reminds of a time in grad school when I found an old medical textbook from the 80s on a discard shelf. I flipped through it and found it chock-a-block with gorgeous black and white anatomical drawing. All very out of date and quite useless from a factual perspective. So I razored the illustrations out and used them as my Christmas cards that year, combining holiday greetings with some nifty facts certain bits of neuroanatomy.
First though I did check the textbook’s resale value on Amazon, as I recall ~$10
Oh, that might explain why the other day I found a 2500 pages Textbook of Surgery (1981, 12th edition) literally in the street ? (I still have it.) Do these books go outdated so fast that a merely 40 years old book is considered "out of date and useless" ?!?
P.S.: To compare with the latest edition 20 year old Physical Statistics book that I just bought and that AFAIK is still suggested as the best reference by my old teacher.
Thanks for the more up-to-date look. Chemical deacidification was still considered a promising avenue of research development in my time in library school 30 years earlier. (I didn't keep up on this because I did my professional work in other areas of librarianship.)
Baker's thesis is that this is a bad idea. Your school taught you the same thing. I'm not sure I see what is wrong.
I also don't see where in the review it says that Baker claims "f you don't want the paper to break, just don't fold it that way". He is claiming that the double-fold test is inaccurate. His "page turn" experiment shows that a book with a very low DFV can survive a lot more usage, so it seems the librarians were exaggerating that point. But on the other hand, if the librarians were only using it prioritize which books to save (books with a higher DFV have a higher time-to-live), then Baker's experiment doesn't disprove that.
What is wrong, Anonymous, is that Baker says this microfilm-based discarding was still going on full-throttle into the 1990s (and so says the review here, in the 2nd paragraph). I was told in 1980 that it had been discontinued in the 1950s. Something is wrong here.
The double-fold test wasn't intended to prove that the book can't survive much more usage. It was intended to identify which books were most fragile and most needed preservation. But my personal experience with researching in books that wouldn't survive the double-fold test is that they flaked bits all over the place and easily tore pages if readers weren't very very careful. As a naturally clumsy and awkward person I found this difficult.
I see. His thesis was that destroying the originals after microfilming them was wrong. That he may have gotten the end date wrong doesn't invalidate his thesis, in my opinion. Just to be clear, when I say thesis, I'm referring to his central argument, not his entire book.
I'm not sure how to reconcile your experience with what he said though. Perhaps it was still going on in a lot of libraries, but there were places where people had stopped? I could imagine it takes a while for approaches to change. Or he could be just wrong :)
Interesting data-point on the the double-fold test. It could be that it was not very predictive (i.e., some books with a low DFV were on their death-bed, others weren't).
I'm not disputing the thesis that destroying the originals is bad. But in Baker's book, that thesis is inextricably combined with his denunciation of libraries for doing it - then-current libraries. And as far as I knew, that denunciation was unjustified.
I'm puzzled by your apparent belief that the fact you were taught in library school in the '80s not to do this means that nobody was doing it since the '50's. Clearly that is not true, and the proof is all the missing originals- right?
As Baker gives absolutely no indication that the destruction did anything other than continue full-throttle through the 1990s, and I know for a fact that the library profession considered it bad practice at least 20 and probably 40 years earlier, something is wrong in Baker's picture.
And since I also know for a fact that some of his other complaints, such as the one about missing information in computer conversion of card catalogs, have no basis in fact -in good library practice-, I think I see what he's doing: combining his own ignorance and his discovery of some flawed practice and attributing it to a system-wide failure that doesn't exist.
My question is of it was considered a bad practice in the 80s, why did Cox write a rebuttal that argues that it was not a bad practice? My only exposure is this article, so I'm honestly confused.
That's not what Cox said. He does say that some materials need to be weeded out - and all librarians would say that - but he does specifically say that the wholesale destruction of the originals of microformed newspapers was wrong - and that's what I was taught as well.
I think more than one person has pointed out that, from the strict point of view of preservation, paper beats almost anything, including film and electronic storage. A well-tended well-made built will easily survive with 100% of its information intact for 200 or more years. That is certainly not true of *any* film and *any* form of digital storage. (In terms of digital storage, beyond ordinary bit-rot for any magnetic medium we have the problem of the technology needed to read even things like pressed CD-ROMs vanishing. Anyone with 5" floppy disks formatted in some ancient DOS format knows this.)
Yup. Lack of dependencies is a pretty amazing advantage.
Digital has its own advantages too, of course, like easy replication and search for known text. But for archiving, a paper master that gets copied into new formats as needed is pretty much ideal.
There's an amusing theme in Fred Pohl's "Heechee" saga, in which tons of alien artifacts are discovered and called "prayer fans" because they look kind of like partially rolled fans. They have little value, are sold as curious and decorations, no effort is made to preserve or study them.
At some point in the saga, humans meet the Heechee themselves, and ask WTF are these things you left all over the place? The Heechee frown and say "Books, of course. Did you not think to try them in one of the reading machines we also left all over the place?"
I could show a USB drive to someone very savvy about computers in 1945, and unless it was in the right context I doubt it would even occur to him that it might be an information-storage device. One hopes we don't have the same problem with respect to the future -- but then, here *we* are wondering WTF the point of Stonehenge was.
All the librarians I've worked with (as one myself, though not personally involved in preservation) know that digital storage is not archivally stable. It's useful as term backup and for access distribution. But then, the librarians I've worked with know and knew a lot of things that Baker says librarians don't know, so I'm pretty skeptical of Baker.
I mean Baker makes specific references to named individuals in this, that seems easy to check on. The book was first published nearly 20 years ago, it's entirely possible that standards might have changed since then.
It's not "since then," it's 20! years! earlier! I was in no position to research all of this, but I'd guess that Baker's description of these named librarians was very misleading, and that's the impression I got at the time from what better-informed librarians than I said about the book.
I think it's worth pointing out that you can usually get a few people on record to say things that aren't necessarily representative of the whole community they claim to represent.
I don't see why the obvious answer isn't just "both". Keep printed books around for long-term archival and as historical artifacts; use digital for ease/speed of access and massively parallel redundancy. Each use case supports the other.
So then what happened to all the books? His entire book is a fabrication and it took some dude an entire other book to just say "everything he says is a lie"?
Is there reason to believe that the ancient DOS format issue will continue to be a thing? I always thought that those were mostly just early chaos due to information technology being unexplored or the limitations of early readers, and as time goes on the formats for data (as well as the quality of archeology software) will become more and more stable. PDF standard was openly released in 2008 but we have the documentation from its first releases in 1993, PNG was invented also in 1997 and standardized in 2003, and as far as I know it's possible to recover the text even from really old Word documents, with no reason why this would become harder over time.
20 years isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but at this point it would surprise me if information on file formats was lost at the same rate as during the 20th century, with the amount of information and software that is kept.
Sure. If you've stressed because you've forgotten an important password from not using it for a while, you understand the problem. It's not just that data formats become old, it's that they get *forgotten*. While a technology is all the rage, it's so ubiquitous that nobody thinks to carefully make and store away archival copies, to to speak, of the archival process itself -- with a helpful glossary of even things that are "obvious" at the time -- so that the future can readily read the records of the past.
Yes, I would guess that almost anything stored in 2008 can be read today, with at most a moderate effort. But what about the world of 2250? What are the chances *they* will know the PDF format sufficient that they can (1) recognize and distinguish it from the other umpty formats that will have been used over the next two centuries? and (2) decipher it perfectly?
We are in uncharted territory here, to some extent. Heretofore the only "equipment" needed to read records of the past was the human eyeball and visual cortex. And even then, we have had problems when languages evolve and/or are forgotten, or records were thrown away or destroyed. *Now* we have not just the durability of the records themselves to consider, but the durability of the interpreting equipment, the preservation of the knowledge of the protocols.
Yes, one would *hope* that standards settle down, but taking a look at the history of, say, USB connectors, or how we store and access music, is not encouraging. How many of us have bought high-quality vinyl, then duplicated it in CDs, then spent man-weeks ripping and digitizing things -- and then subscribing to a streaming service? It's notoriously hard to predict the future of consumer technology.
It requires magnifying lenses to read, but no electronics, and contains a very clear visual clue about the nature of the content and the fact that it's very tiny.
There's also a version that you can get as a necklace
Let's assume that technological progress continues -- DOS floppies were replaced by multi-page TIFF files, which were replaced by PDF files, which will be replaced by who-knows-what. Given that, it seems like any digital document archive needs to have some sort of "regular upgrade" process in place. None of those storage media/formats vanished overnight. There's always a period of, I dunno, but let's say ten years where equipment and software to read the old formats are widely available, and converting to the new format is relatively easy. (As one example, MS Word version n can generally read files created by Word version n-1, and probably n-2 and n-3, as well.) On top of that, the new formats are generally cheaper and smaller, so there should be good incentives to do the conversions.
I know pretty much nothing about professional archiving, so maybe this is already standard practice? I would hope so. But I still see lots of people worrying about old formats, so I wonder.
Of course, this doesn't address all of the points. The look and feel of actual 5.25" floppies can't be replaced with a PDF file -- just like paper can't be completely replaced by any digital format. But if the goal is to archive content, then regular updates/conversions should work.
It should, yes. But we're assuming an efficiency and forethought among human beings that is a little dubious. I mean, heck, *I* have a VHS tape somewhere of my wedding. I dread what would be required to read it and digitize it, and if I delay enough I bet there's a tolerable chance my great-grandkids will be unable to see it.
A more important point, perhaps, is one that is stressed in the review, which is that we do not always know at the time the decision has to be made what is worth preserving and what is not, according to the standards of the distant future. For example, the reviewer says it's obvious that we should preserve the autobiographical musings of Barack Obama and not this weeks Walmart catalogue. I can easily imagine that 250 years hence they would think that an insane choice: a Walmart catalogue from 2021 would (for them) contain a treasure trove of information about 2020s technology, tastes, and economics. Obama's musings over issues that, for them, are as dead and boring as the burning question of whether Quintus or his older brother Marcus was going to succeed to the praetorship in 106 BC is to us.
Digitizing VHS's is pretty easy - get a VHS player (you know, the kind with the red, white, and yellow plugs) and then buy a $30 USB adapter from your preferred online retailer.
They still sell VHS players? Whew! I guess I can put it off for some more years...as is the nature of humans, I'll only get to it when the situation is barely recoverable.
> the reviewer says it's obvious that we should preserve the autobiographical musings of Barack Obama and not this weeks Walmart catalogue.
Pedantic correction: the reviewer does not say this. They say the memoirs are more important than the catalogue, not that the catalogue shouldn't be preserved.
Well, PDF/A is an archival format (it's what the A means), and hopefully the archivists that designed it were aware of these issues ?
Another problem is that PDF, despite it's name, and unlike, for instance (M)HTML, is not a format appropriate for electronic documents... but hopefully the Internet Archive is saving web pages for at least the medium term (~100 years) too ?
[Disclaimer: I work on PDF processing software, so I'm pretty familiar with PDF, but also have a vested interest in it.]
The "not a format appropriate for electronic documents" is a common view, and somewhat misleading in my opinion. I prefer to say that PDF is good for some things, and not so much for others. If you have a static document, a Word file or whatever, and you want to make it widely available to people who don't have (a specific version of) Word, don't have the exact fonts you used, etc, then PDF works great. PDF is terrible as an editable format. It's also pretty bad if you want to reflow to fit a smaller screen, though I think this is becoming less of an issue as phones get bigger.
PDF (as a format) is a little more constrained than HTML. I'm not really confident that I'll be able to read a 2021 HTML file in 2031. Heck, I can't always view a 2021 HTML on every single 2021 browser -- lots of weird little compatibility issues with CSS, JavaScript, and so on. On the other hand, I'm pretty confident that I'll still be able to read a 2021 PDF file in 2031.
I'm less confident that I'll be able to read a 2021 PDF in 2121. Maybe we'll all be using holographic brain implants or something, and maybe Adobe went out of business 50 years ago, and no one has bothered to write PDF viewer software for the brain implants, because we're all using the whizzy new XYZ document format.
I think the key is to take advantage of the period where PDF overlaps with XYZ, and make a point of converting everything over. That leads to all sorts of questions -- do we really need to convert *everything*, who's responsible for converting, who supplies the holographic disk space, etc.
I wonder if the Internet Archive is doing anything along those lines? When they save a particular web page, I think they're saving a verbatim copy, CSS quirks and all. How do we make sure that's viewable in 2031 and 2121?
PDF seems to have pretty bad support for animations -
(GIFs are obsolete, MP4 support is a crapshoot depending on reader, and we should be moving to AV1 for rasterized pictures and animations soon anyway... BTW what support does PDF(/A) have for vector pictures and animations ?)
- and also maybe for interactive animations, though it seems to have built-in JavaScript support (which sadly might be a security issue).
Yeah, I went back to a pretty cool website recently, and since it used Flash for interactive animations...
HTML at least can be easily edited (these days from inside the browser itself in real time !) if there's an issue, and I expect to be able to read the UTF-8 text inside an HTML file with the simplest of text editors for a long long time...
It might be interesting to look at DVI support as a potential future of PDF ?
There may be some way of incorporating animations into PDF, but I wouldn't want to count on that working across viewers. Best to think of PDF as for static documents -- things you could print on a piece of paper.
PDF certainly has support for (static) vector drawings. It's more sophisticated (or overly complex, if you like) than SVG, for example.
PDF/A is a subset of PDF. Essentially it disallows use of some features and puts restrictions on other features, with the goal being to get PDF files that will work reliably across different PDF viewers (and presumably across time).
Is there reason to believe that the ancient DOS format issue will continue to be a thing?
I always thought that those were mostly either limitations of early readers, or chaos due to information technology being unexplored and every company reinventing the wheel on their own in a different way. As time goes on, wouldn't one expect that data formats become more and more stable, and as available data grows, the quality of archeological software that can open a lot of formats increases? PDF and PNG are both 20-30 years old already, and even ancient text documents are still mostly legible, though some require work to get there. Do you expect a 2015 picture to be difficult to read in 2030?
The challenge is that mostly the popular formats are what gets saved and a lot of other stuff just rots and fades into obscurity. PDF and PNG and ASCII and UTF-8 text (and even some more obscure encodings) will probably remain legible, but what about Deluxe Paint files? What about magazine layout files from old versions of Quark?
If you follow the Video Game History foundation you can learn a whole bunch about all these issues and more, which a focus on video games specifically (the situation feels a bit bleak sometimes)
At the risk of being annoyingly object-level, Deluxe Paint files are in a fairly well-documented file format, and a bunch of actively-maintained tools can read them -- netpbm, ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick, various others. The source code for the ones I mentioned is out there and should be easy enough to keep running for a good long while.
Old versions of QuarkXPress should run under emulation, and as far as I know have always been able to export PostScript files, which are plain text, widely readable, etc. If I'm wrong about that for the earliest versions, a pre-OSX Mac emulator with a virtual LaserWriter printer should be able to get the same effect.
I'm skeptical about the danger of old file formats, as long as emulators exist and people keep copying archives of old software onto new storage media. None of that is hard; it just takes a non-zero amount of effort, and so is often neglected for more obscure stuff. A quick look through the VGHF's blog makes it sound like the problems are less about old file formats and more with things just not being preserved at all except as a decaying set of floppy disks in a collector's basement or some ultra-rare NES cartridge hidden away in a secret room in the Vatican.
I know plenty of people who have opened old Quark Express files and have lost all kinds of formatting information. Frank Cifaldi at the Video Game History foundation went over this a while back, where he had layout files from old game magazines, and even pulling out all the stops and calling on all his considerable connections, plenty of formatting information was simply lost in the churn.
Also:
as long as emulators exist
This is a big, big, big, if.
Don't even get me started on emulation. We're doing a pretty good job on this, but emulation is far from perfect, and it's typically only for mega popular platforms (e.g. Nintendo consoles) that we get the years of necessary obsessive effort to reverse engineer, decap, etc, to get cycle-accurate emulation.
Only recently have we gotten the Original Xbox to any degree of acceptable emulation, and likewise the PS3, and neither of these are perfect replacements for the originals. Even when games seem to "run fine", all sorts of subtle timing errors creep in that make the game look, play, or sound differently than the original that are clear when you put it side-by-side with the real thing, but otherwise you might not notice.
And don't get me started on how all of the original consoles were designed with clever visual effects tricks that only work on cathode-ray-tube displays with specific refresh rates and phosphor blending that you still can't reproduce with perfect fidelity on most modern displays. Even with fancy "CRT Filters", to even approach reproducing some of the original effects reliably on an LCD panel you need to have at least 4K resolution.
My point is not that we aren't preserving some things, it's that often we aren't even aware of the fidelity we're losing.
Basically the idea is to not use a volatile organic material for the data film inside the disc (big surprise). I really doubt the quest for a real archival quality digital format is over, or that there are no good options just because the digital media we have now are ephemeral. Digital technology itself is practically ephemeral compared against the "arc of history".
The best archival macroscopic digital storage (taking about the same space/mass as the equivalent ordinary book with the same info density) is probably going to be a stack of thin gold plates.
Yes the company is dead. Is it a prerequisite that the original proprietor must exist during the entire mean lifetime of the storage artifact for it to be legitimate?
I did not see any reference to Syylex in my research so far. They do not seem to have any discs for sale (at least not in North America) whereas M-DISCs are available for $$$. Also many burners advertise M-DISC compatibility.
What exactly do you mean by "well-tended," and what does it cost? Yes, copying your data to a new medium and checking its integrity occasionally is an ongoing expense, but so is keeping books in physical storage and protecting them from fire, weather, etc. For sufficient values of "well-tended," *any* medium will last 200 years.
I suspect the differences in how careful you have to be are enormous. I have a scrapbook my mother made for me 50 years ago when I was a tot, full of photos and her notes and whatnot. I have done absolutely nothing to take care of this other than keep it out of the rain, and it's almost as good as the day she made it. On the other hand, I have mag tape records of computer programs I wrote 25 years ago which (1) I have no idea how to read, would certainly require very expensive resurrection or construction of an obsolete tape machine technology, and (2) has probably accumulated a fair number of errors from entropy, so who knows if it's readable at all?
"paper beats almost anything, including film and electronic storage."
This entirely discounts backups, storage capacity, cost unfairly favoring paper.
A terabyte is something like a million books (around 100K words each), including some metadata. It costs... pretty much nothing, and will cost even less in the future.
Take libgen. Is it less resilient than similar collection on paper? How would you even go with making a backup of that on paper?
Yes, there are outlandish scenarios where humanity suddenly collapses or something. Through I don't see it happening universally across the globe WITH 'book preservation' being of any concern at the same time.
The terabyte itself isn't expensive, just like digging a hole and putting the books in the big mylar bag in the ground isn't expensive.
What file format are you using? How often are you checking the hard drive? What is your plan for when the hard drive fails? How will you detect failure ahead of time?
There are armies of professionals working on this who have though of it more than you and me put together. These are people doing it at scale and it's still expensive.
Also that people are more likely to read the good ones. I only get a few paragraphs into some, halfway through others, and only finish a few. Obviously correlated with which ones I liked. How should that be indicated?
- Presents something I didn't know I was interested in and makes me interested in it
- Provides a solid & readable summary of the book's best arguments
- Contextualizes it for the modern reader and addresses some common criticisms
- Assesses what the reviewer's own conclusion on the matter was
I noticed in a post once that the Internet Archive goes out of its way not to guillotine material and has a fancy and presumably more expensive scanner that works page by page and requires a manual operator, wouldn't be surprised to see if they've read this book or just came to the same opinions on the matter.
I stopped reading this review twice, because I became so enraged. To me, this is culture wars material. I have seen university librarians reduce the size of the collections to create more "thinking space", or because a new online system was expensive or we needed more computer labs for students who already own computers. One local library reduced its collection simply because they reduced the height of the shelves in order to serve the Frank Lloyd Wright aesthetic of the beautiful new building.
This review reminded me of two stellar short works by librarian Peter Briscoe: Reading the Map of Knowledge which concerns the art of librarianship and is a paean to those glorious few librarians who love real physical books and do themselves read voraciously. He also wrote an elegiac novella called "The Best Read Man in France" about a book collector who has been putting together a rare collection of North and South American Early Colonial Scientific Treatises and Researches by Jesuits. It's a melancholic meditation on the fate of historical knowledge in modern society.
How did you make this so thrilling to read? Its an argument about proper data storage and how fast acidic paper decays. And a methodological point that how they tested paper longevity was biased. I should not have been excited while reading this, but I was. I kept expecting somehow to shout Objection! or confess betrayal on a rooftop in the middle of a storm.
I have not read the book reviewed here ("Double Fold"), but this review makes it sound pretty one sided, and the review does not challenge it.
There does seem to be a consensus today that "destructive preservation" was a bad idea, but there is very little consideration here of economic and logistical pressures which presumably pushed (some) librarians in that direction.
Regarding dumpster books today, my understanding is that these days the large majority of de-accessioned books in the USA are sold or donated to at-scale efforts like Better World Books, who sort and variously re-distribute internationally; sell used on Amazon; donate to other libraries; destroy/recycle a final fraction of books. If you look in the dumpsters it is mostly best sellers from decades past, of which there are hundreds of thousands of duplicate unwanted copies. It seems pretty efficient and heterogeneous (eg, "the market", librarians, independent organizations, and collectors all get to take a pass before something gets binned).
Nick Basbane's book "Patience and Fortitude" (2001; strong recommend overall if you skip any chapters boring to you) has some segments in the final section ("Book Places") about weeding into off-site warehouses, preservation (microfilming and digitization), and the SFPL main branch. Basbane is ultimately on the "keep books", but I thought presented both sides of several debates reasonably.
"Edition of One" (1990, available to borrow at https://archive.org/details/editionofoneauto0000powe) is the autobiography Eugene Power, who founded University Microfilm (now ProQuest) in Ann Arbor, and was involved in the early days of microfilm as a business. Interesting history, though there is a lot of personal history to skim over. The early days seem to have centered around microfilm as a distribution and low-cost publishing tech, as opposed to preservation and paper-replacement.
I have several family members who are / were librarians at various institutions. It is to be noted that this is not US, but yeah process is similar in the generic city public library here. Copies that do not get picked from the carts go to recycling. Sometimes copies deemed uninteresting are recycled directly, never making it to the cart.
One of the aforementioned relatives related how that part of the job felt quite depressing when it came to discarding nonfiction and magazines / journals. Another remarked they felt it was silly to order such large amounts "hot" popular entertainment reading of the day to only discard it some years after.
Nothing is supposed to be permanently lost on national level, as at least one copy of each title are supposed to be held at the national book repository, available through interlibrary loans. Naturally, national library receives and supposedly archives copies of everything published in the country. Old newspapers were digitized relatively recently, and digitized version were of quite good quality. Don't know what the situation here was during the time period described by the reviewed book, though.
However, there is the issue practical availability and resilience by redundancy. Concerning redundancy, fires and catastrophes happen. In archiving sense, keeping only one copy around sounds like living dangerously.
Practical availability is another thing. One and only copy of a book on the whole continent that stays in a climate controlled repository and is recorded in the database, but requires particular effort by a professional of its publishing era to find because next to all other books that cite it and books that cite them sit next to it in the same repository ... well, that book is not exactly as dead as the one whose whole print was destroyed, but the climate control there is not unlike a ventilator. It is a very different from the book that is available in their nearby library. It is very different from the book that is put on display on front desk next to card "books related to the [insert theme of the month], please take".
Not everything can be selected to be available in every library (because that is the nature of selecting things), but there is power in having the ability to select and weed out some books that thus became increasingly rare.
I myself collected a very nice professional home reference library of 1960s to 1990s and some 00s applied math and physics textbooks by regularly checking the give away trays of all university libraries in the nearby metropolitan area. I am uncertain what to think about the implications (other than, good for me). University libraries do not need old textbooks much when professors assign more current editions. On the other, content in these fields very rarely goes bad. At worst, latest developments are missing or the results that are true simply do not interest anyone, because the application domain marched on. On the other hand, there is lots of remarkable information in old textbooks. For example, undergraduate (not to speak of graduate) program textbooks appeared to have more difficult problems sets than what was assigned by teachers.
> There does seem to be a consensus today that "destructive preservation" was a bad idea, but there is very little consideration here of economic and logistical pressures which presumably pushed (some) librarians in that direction.
Hey there bnewbold!
This is a great point. In the lead-up to writing *Double Fold*, Nicholson Baker got into a very public fight with librarians about removing physical card catalogues.
It's true that the card catalogues in some places were very beautiful and in most cases had involved a lot of labor to create, but the argument that they would be a good use of library space and librarians' time in the future feels bizarre to me at this distance, and Baker didn't seem to have a lot of interest in thinking or talking about the limitations and pressures that the librarians were facing!
Oh, the card catalogs. That was a matter I was directly involved in, as my job as a librarian was converting card catalogs to electronic form. Baker's argument was that a lot of valuable information, often specific to the individual copy, was preserved on catalog cards that didn't get transferred to electronic form. But he was mistaken. For one thing, when I did the job, at least, that information got transferred. For another, he seems unaware that, even after discarding the main card catalog, the library preserved a master card catalog in the back workroom called the shelf list, and those cards had not only the information Baker was concerned about, but more information, e.g. on acquisition dates, that never appeared in the public catalog at all.
Ditto this final comment. Another thing to add: I also know of cases where card catalogs were kept when the digitization of their content was never fully completed (because of cost constraints.) Librarians I have worked with are very careful about this.
That doesn't seem sufficient to make it not one-sided. The reviewer tells us where to find another side, but they only occasionally actually give us another side.
My wife, formerly a librarian for King County (the nation's largest library system), had never heard of this book, which has me wondering exactly how ubiquitous the book is among the profession.
I appreciated the effort to take a position here while giving the other side's arguments their due. I'm sympathetic to the position, too-- take that, High Modernists! But I think it's oversold a little here. The loss of old materials is frustrating but not a horrific harm to human flourishing in the way that, say, urban planning and agriculture policy can be. Also, the advent of good color digitization makes the microfilmers look basically right in principle, though 50-some years premature. Modern computers get around all of the microfilm drawbacks that the review mentions. Even so, this was a very effective, readable summary of Double Fold and a fun window into a bit of history and society that I had no idea existed.
> Modern computers get around all of the microfilm drawbacks that the review mentions.
Well, most of them!
I agree that digitization has gone in a direction that undermines or dodges a lot of Baker's criticisms. And it's also sometimes made books *more* useful, because OCR lets you search quickly for particular terms (in an individual book or a whole collection), and perform statistical analyses and everything. Like it made possible the Google n-grams corpus.
But the review mentions the "mummy paper" thing, where you might not know at first what physical properties of a book are going to appear important or interesting in the future. And it also feels hard to me to get a consensus on what kind of resolution (or illumination) is sufficient for posterity. One thing I've noticed over and over again is that new recording and reproduction technologies feel awesome and impossibly realistic when they first come out, and then in retrospect often feel kind of crummy when compared with newer technologies. Like the first time I saw a 640x480 scanned photograph on a computer, I said "wow, this is photo-realistic!". But that same photograph would definitely not feel that way to me today.
So someone might choose a particular number of dpi, or a particular color depth, or other aspects of the scanning process, and conclude that it's perfectly adequate as a substitute for the physical book, but maybe with the advance of technology we would no longer view it that way. I know for paintings there's been an effort to photograph them more and more and more accurately, for example so that people can study the details of individual brush strokes. The fact that it's even possible to make a photograph allowing this kind of close study probably wouldn't even have occurred to most people a few decades ago.
Maybe this is especially relevant for books that contain various kinds of illustrations and artwork: one might say that a preservation-quality scan should be at least comparable to the fidelity of whatever the printing process was that produced the imagery in the physical book. (And that varies from book to book, or century to century!)
I'm not trying to make a kind of mystical argument that *no* degree of imaging fidelity could ever be sufficient for preservation—although I guess that's kind of true in the narrow case of things like the mummy paper thing, or maybe people want to use old paper to calibrate curves of C₁₄ for carbon dating because it's a product of trees stamped by humans with specific individual years of harvesting—but more just point out that it's easy to look at something and say "wow, that's beautiful and incredibly detailed; how could anyone ever want more detail than that?" and then have this judgment go stale after a few more years of technical progress!
Seems like the obvious answer is to designate a few (geographically distributed) archival libraries that are dedicated to keeping original paper copies of everything, complete with climate-controlled storage and whatever else is needed. Then we can go back every however-many years and re-scan with the latest technology.
The fact that this seems so obvious to me almost certainly means I'm missing something. Ok, this would be a really expensive project, and who wants to spend all that money on old newspapers. But is there something more than that?
Wow, I was just talking about *Double Fold* on the phone with a friend last night (!!).
I loved the extra context and analysis that this review offered. Really a terrific and thought-provoking discussion.
This reminds me of various things:
(1) I remember feeling that Baker underrated digital scanning, which could be done to much higher standards than microfilm scanning, producing a much more usable, accurate, and appealing version of a book's content. I think this has proven true; even though most of his attack is against microfilm, I recall that he was also pessimistic on digitization, which seems like a criticism that hasn't aged as well. There are legitimate criticisms of digitization, but it's mostly been a humongous improvement compared to microfilm.
(2) The part of the book that explains that older paper is *much more durable* than, um, middle-aged paper—as the review explains—came as a big revelation to me, since I'd seen cheap pulp paperbacks falling apart in my hands at merely 40 or 50 years of age, but meanwhile my father's bookstore had books that were hundreds of years old that seemed pretty much fine. Since our intuition about most things is that older will translate to more fragile and worse condition, this is really important and counterintuitive even for people who like books a lot but have never studied paper or preservation.
After reading Baker's explanation, I've pondered and mentioned to friends that the oldest book I own (the New Testament in Greek edited by Mills, published 1787 in London) is totally fine and you can easily read it by hand just as you would read any modern book. This despite the fact that it's *the same age as the U.S. constitution*. (It was rebound in cloth, in what looks to me like the 1940s or so.) This is a powerful reminder of Baker's point that eighteenth and nineteenth century paper is *awesome*.
(3) I remember the librarians' anger at Baker over this book. I met one librarian when this came out who said "this man who writes softcore porn has a lot of presumption in telling librarians how to be custodians of culture", or words closely to that effect. (This is a reference to *The Fermata*, Baker's 1994 erotic timestopping novel.) According to my friend who works for a major library system, some librarians have never forgiven Baker and still feel offended by his criticisms to this day.
(4) Regarding the dumpster issue:
> Many other books were, however, simply trashed. As a combination of bizarre rules, bureaucratic stubbornness, fear of publicity, and simple inertia, it’s apparently very rare for American libraries to simply donate discarded books to the public. Sometimes the books are sold, but usually they are thrown into the dumpster, regardless of their value.
My father was able to save a lot of books by discreetly asking librarians when they were going to put deaccessioned books into the dumpster. I think he said that, if he asked nicely, they would even put the books *next to* the dumpster rather than inside it. Presumably everything about this varies a lot from library to library—in terms of the quality, condition, and scarcity of what's deaccessioned, how the individual librarians feel about it, and how willing they are to cooperate with people who want to grab the books and give them a new home—but the "fear of publicity" part rings true to me. I think the librarians my father knew did not feel that any book lover would like to see, or even think of, books put out in the trash, even as a result of a reasoned deliberation by librarians about how best to serve library users.
I don't know how deaccessioning has changed over time, but it may still be possible in some places to ask for a heads-up and try to grab some of the books on their way out. I still have the impression it would be best to be discreet about that! But I bet computer cataloguing and online retailing have somewhat reduced the extent to which rare books end up in the trash, because it's so much easier today to check whether something is unusual and/or economically valuable.
FWIW, this claim appears to be false: "After 20 years, the book remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among librarians."
I'm a public librarian by trade, I've never heard of this book, nor heard anyone discuss it, or even it subject matter. Doesn't mean it isn't known by many, but clearly not universal.
I will also add that in many jurisdictions, government instutions are *not allowed* to donate books (I know this is the case for universities in Washington State, for instance). The idea seems to be that this is "wasting taxpayer dollars" or something. Therefore, any books that are deaccessioned are, by law, required to go in dumpsters.
I can assure you that most academic librarians in these jurisdictions are not happy about this (they would MUCH rather donate them to anyone who wants them) but it's not their call.
Cynically, I would speculate that the reason some government institutions are not allowed to donate books is to stop dilution of the market for new copies or printings of the book, and that these laws (or policies) are due to lobbying from copyright holders. At a minimum it would be better if works could be donated if they were in the public domain or "orphaned" (copyright holder can not be identified or reached).
I have a Library Science degree, and there are some constraining factors here. Just adding more shelf space is a lot harder than this makes it sound, and most library systems have *no money* for this. The librarians know the last time someone looked at an item in their collection; quite often it’s been decades. They can’t keep all of this copious, bulky material at the expense of new titles and risk stagnation. They have nowhere to put the damn stuff and no one will give you money to build infinite climate-controlled warehouses for books and papers that haven’t been checked out in decades.
How did libraries manage to do it before 1950? In the early 1900s, there were about 10,000 unique titles issued by recognized publishing houses in the US each year. That number in 2010 was over 300,000. Add in all the niche, indie and on-demand titles and you’re talking millions of titles. Every year. And that’s just books.
Is paper still the best storage medium going? Of course. Is it a tragedy to lose the entire run of a paper due to technical or coordination failures? Absolutely. But I don’t believe it’s physically possible for even the most well-heeled and interconnected system of libraries to keep everything we’ve been generating for decades, especially when those materials have been sought out by exactly no one in a human lifetime. The alternative to preservation by destruction in most cases wasn’t preservation, it was just flat out destruction.
I dunno that I find it persuasive that it could be done in the early 1900s because there were far fewer new titles. It was also the case that in the early 1900s the US population was of order 75 million (versus 330 million today) and the economy much smaller. One would reasonably suspect that the *resources* of the libraries of the 1900s were proportionately smaller than those of the libraries in 2010, so 10,000 new titles a year in 1900 might be just as hard (or easy) to store as 300,000 new titles a year in 2010.
What you would need to argue is that, for example, the *ratio* of new titles to population (or GDP) has grown significantly since the 1900s, or the ratio of library resources to population/GDP has fallen. Neither of these strike me as a priori obvious: as a nation, I rather suspect reading and books (and libraries) were a lot more important on a per capita basis in 1900 than they are today. *Today* you can get along in much of life without reading books much better than you could then -- there's speaking devices and videos and recordings and Wikipedia and Google and Siri and so forth. What ordinary citizen needs to go to the library to look at books any more?
Actually, I should revise that to say that while I'm a little doubtful that the library resources per capita would fall *of necessity* I'm very open to the argument that they have fallen *by choice*. That is, as a society, we simply don't care to spend the money on libraries and library-related things the way we used to, because we don't use libraries nearly as much.
But this doesn't necessarily contradict Baker's point, because it's a *choice* not something that was inevitable. Of course, one doubts that librarians themselves were in favor of that choice, so blaming them seems unreasonable.
Let's say that the national budget for libraries has increased proportionally with the national population, and that the national publishing output has also increased proportionately.
The main way this plays out with municipal and academic libraries is that there are more individual libraries, not that every individual library gets more resources. Each individual library is faced with an every growing corpus of books to purchase from. If each library was some perfect shard of a national system, then they could work together and cover everything, but each library is expected to mostly supply popular books, which are mostly the same books everywhere.
The counter example is something like Library of Congress, which has grown and has very deep coverage. But note that it is mostly closed stacks: they don't have nearly enough copies of each work to lend them out even in a single town or city, let alone the whole country.
Some of the efforts I have heard of that mitigate this are: offsite storage with rapid retrieval (cheaper than storing in a regular branch location); library systems, consortium, and national catalogs, which help distribute the burden rare/unique books across many libraries, with access via Inter-Library-Loan; specialization of individual libraries; centralization into huge "main branches" which have grown over time; etc.
But there is a systems dynamic that more people means more books, but doesn't mean more money for individual libraries to purchase a significant fraction of those books. This problem is particularly acute for academic libraries subscribing to journals. Any "respectable" research library is expected to subscribe to "all the important research"; as the number of universities and research institutions grows, the volume and cost of "all the important research" goes up, but the individual institutions are overwhelmed. In this case everything is mostly digital, so it is purely an economic crisis.
Well, sure, but this seems a little tangential to the main question, which is one of archival storage of things that people rarely access. We're not talking about keeping up with the best-seller list, right? *That* hasn't grown much. So...why *couldn't* an increasing number of individual libraries split the burden? Inter-library loan for rare stuff, et cetera. I mean, surely more libraries are now part of big systems, no? Town libraries become part of county systems, et cetera.
Not saying it *actually is* done that way, but if it *could* be then, again, this is a choice, not something inevitable.
As an archivist, I think you’re underestimating the expense involved here. Keeping books on shelves is not free. We’re talking about some seriously vast facilities here, and they need careful management. Even if you put them in some magically ideal-for-books climate, you need to ensure that they’re protected from all kinds of environmental factors. That’s before you get to maintaining the bibliographic records that tell you what you have, not to mention staff, assuming you want to find and access these items ever again.
I got from Library Science into IT via digitization, and I know how many times I explained to people that creating and maintaining digital copies of things, or even metadata related to them, was not free or even cheap.
This is an issue that goes far beyond libraries; I was once sent to examine digits property records in a midsize midwestern city. A task that should have taken hours took days because we discovered that the original 19th century handwritten property record books had been poorly digitized, the index numbers at the top of each page lopped off by the scanner. Nobody had noticed this in *ten years* and the originals had been destroyed. But the town registrar had the same problem as everyone else; no space, no funding, and an obligation to accept the low bid from vendors.
The extent to which people, or societies, are making choices here is debatable. It’s the same kind of coordination problem as afflicts every other aspect of life, and it’s also extremely hard to accurately value any individual piece of paper below a certain threshold. Archivists have a rubric for defining value and determining what gets kept and for how long. Most of the paper and content we produce simply does not meet that threshold.
I wasn't addressing the expense, only (initially) the argument that the *absolute* amount of paper published governed the challenge of long-term storage -- I argued that one would have to divide that number by the overall wealth of the society to see how the *relative* amount of paper (relative to overall resources) has changed. Secondarily, I doubted that it is not possible for libraries to in principle coordinate their archival function, such that more libraries indeed translated to a larger resource base for that function.
Since I didn't esimate the expense, I can hardly have underestimated it, but I take your point that the details of how it's down would be sobering. I mean, that's kind of true for almost anything: those of us who know the details (in our area of expertise) find it annoying that other people assume it ought to be easy-peasy to do better by deploying This One Weird Trick which I just thought of in two seconds, tops. I'm sympathetic to the annoyance of the expert at the near universal 21st century devaluing of hard-won wisdom based on experience and the concomitant over-valuing of a facile ability to craft a reasoned argument based on a light skimming of Wikipedia articles.
One resource has not grown exponentially: land. A hundred years ago, if Columbia wanted another 20k sq ft of Harlam for a specialized library, that was no big deal. It was a sleepy little New York suburb and land was cheap.
One could imagine a massive archival library in Montana with paper copies of everything, but it would only be accessible to researchers determined enough to fly to Montana.
I suppose the Montana facility could have the one guy with the camera in his headband, and if someone wanted to read something they'd get on Skype and he would sit very still, slowly moving his head while the client read off the screen thousands of miles away.
We could surely get Boston Dynamics to whip us up a reader-bot. Honestly, I love the idea of a massive warehouse (or set of warehouses) on underused land where we store physical copies of all the books and papers. Maybe even build a couple of them to protect against fire and nuclear strikes. But I don't know who's paying for it.
I would also point out that for many libraries, over time this can also turn in to an *existential* risk to the organization, and potentially to the material collections it is responsible for. If patrons (the public, private funders, whoever) are not using and continuing to see the value in a library, they are much less likely to continue funding it and defending it in other ways. A large "dark" (not accessible) preservation collection can easily become a collection nobody knows or cares about, and that nobody will be upset about shutting down and shredding entirely.
This line of argument (institutional self-preservation) can of course be taken too far, and I do personally think some libraries are going too far in the "fewer books" direction (because I think the public generally loves having lots of physical books around, even if they are not touching or reading them). But I am frustrated by people who think "real librarians" should prioritize books over public access and design. I think effective long-term planning requires strong and diverse support in ever-changing society.
Don't art museums have a similar problem? I think the Met has about 5x as much in its collection as it can display. I don't know what the library equivalent of rotating your collection and having special exhibits to boost awareness is. This Week Only! Come See Our Unique Collection of Early Superman Comics!
> The librarians know the last time someone looked at an item in their collection; quite often it’s been decades.
They know when an item was last *checked out*, but do they keep records of everything that gets taken off the shelf? (Genuine question. For all I know it's standard practice for research libraries to record every book that gets re-shelved.)
I have been asked in more than one university research library to place all books I pull off the shelves onto a return cart, instead of re-shelving myself. When I asked the librarian said it wasn't just because they didn't trust folks to re-shelve in the right spot, but also wanted to know what materials were being browsed. I'm not sure if they scanned barcodes or something to record this digitally, or just got a feel for it on a human level when re-shelving.
Yes, they scan barcodes. This also has to do with storage. If they notice that lots of people are perusing a book, it is less likely to go to offsite storage, because they now know that they will spend a lot of time shipping it back to main library campus. But if something is rarely looked at based on the data, it is more likely to go to offsite storage, because they know they won't have to ship it back as often.
Thrilled to see this almost forgotten book reviewed. The microfilming insanity was on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and Baker is a true hero. I was stunned while I read the original, and then stunned again at the vicious response by the library community. It ended my love of librarians.
Has anyone looked into deep learning based super resolution systems? Baker's juxtaposition of the full color and the black-and-white blobs could be used as training data.
For any low resolution image, there will be multiple plausible reconstructions of a high-resolution original. I'm not sure that any information gained in this way would be reliable.
I wonder to what extent the events chronicled here inspired Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End." A major plot arc of Rainbows End is a slightly-futuristic version of this: books being outright shredded, because the cheapest way to digitize books was to scan the shredda and geometrically reconstruct the pages.
I remember going to the library with my family as an elementary school-age child. Once I'd found the Red Dwarf VHS I wanted to check out and bring home, I had little to do. I usually ended up at the microfiche machines scanning through archived versions of our local news paper looking for the funny pages.
Maybe the technology was better by then (1990s), but I don't recall finding the images to be of low quality or difficult to read.
I think there was a large range of quality. I've definitely seen some iffy ones when I was scrolling through microfiche of 1950s-era newspapers from a small Western city looking for obituaries of relatives.
I've never seen much empty shelf space at a library. Approximately every volume acquired means a volume let go. Microfilming it first is better than not.
The dominant use of microfilm was newspapers. They were printed on the cheapest paper of the day and they don't do the anaerobic thing as well as books. For that matter, they don't sit neatly on a shelf like books. And they're an absolute nightmare to re-assemble if some reader is less than careful. I remain unconvinced that a century of newspapers in their original form was ever a practical thing for a library to make available.
Microfilm may not have been a great format, but it's what was available and it's easy to scan to something more modern.
NYT did the special print on durable material for archival, but newspapers (all kinds of papers) can be bound by people who have them. Older books have got rebound often. Some people bind their comics.
Covers of a book are relatively unimportant, and without them, a book is a stack of printed leafs and surprisingly similar to ... a bunch of newspapers. This is how the trope of wealthy aristocrats having a library with books that look exactly the same came to be: it used to be a thing get a book and rebind it.
Actually originated in the days when books were sold unbound. The purchaser would then get it bound separately. Aristocrats getting all their books bound in identical covers became a thing then.
Daniel's concerns about the unpracticality of newspapers applies to the bound volumes (bound by the library, not the original publisher) as well as to loose papers. They don't sit neatly on the shelf because the volumes are big and awkward, and the crumbling paper easily falls apart as the pages are turned. The result is a nightmare. Baker's one valid point is that they're much easier to browse through than microform - if they're physically hardy enough to stand it.
It does seem that there was a lack of planning in terms of how to create a networked system of information preservation. If even five places in the country got together to divvy up who would keep a complete archive of which papers, we could still have that complete archive and know about it even if it was not all in one place.
If anyone has ever dealt with genealogical records and had to look at old, crooked microfiche of obituaries in newspapers, you know that sometimes the last, or first, paragraph is cut off. Often enough for it to pose an issue. Even if "film is generally good," on a case by case basis a flawed film is not better than an old paper copy. It isn't wrong to face the loss.
I've also seen subsequent printings of books take out parts, say of an introduction, that later generations might not like and publish it as if it were the same thing. My memory retains the earlier pages, but what else does? I go forlornly to the volume and flip through, trying again to grasp where those strange paragraphs once were. There are competing impulses, the impulse to edit and improve something, and the impulse to hold on to it as it is, so later we have a door into what those a**h***s were thinking.
Honestly, 1980s-era math textbooks are a treasure trove. Pre-common core, problem set after problem set, lucid explanations. I have a feeling that once those are gone, they'll be gone, because after all, what is special about a math textbook? Yet one of the most important stories of modern times is told in the progression of changes to those books, and without that record the story will sound very different.
Additionally, maybe some people here know people who were involved in it, a year ago when the pandemic shutdowns were all on and state unemployment systems were bogging down because they'd never been modernized and now they had like one person on the staff who still knew Fortran or Cobol and they simply could not update the systems fast enough, and they were trying to get old programmers out of retirement to help. Knowledge transfer is important.
I see community libraries getting rid of books on a weekly basis. Twenty years ago when I worked shelving books in a local library, that library went by the date the book had last been checked out. I don't remember how long, but I think it was five years. If something wasn't checked out in that length of time it was "donated" to their nonprofit auxiliary where they were sold in a yard-sale type environment. I don't know what happened to the ones nobody bought.
I took a writing class from a less-well-known author in the 1990s. In that library in the early 2000s there were several of his books. In 2013 there were two and by 2019, one.
Where I live now, there are three trucks of "free" books out in front of the library doors every day. I don't know how fast they disappear, but I look at them once every few months and there is near-complete replacement. At least these are not being thrown out.
Last year I found a book of local history, created by a large group of volunteers and published in the 1980s by a community organization which no longer exists. It is an amazing book. It has a library of congress catalog number but is long, long out of print. The local community would benefit from this book but there it was being given away. I am confident in guessing that it was never digitized, and being that it was made 40 years ago, the people who were old when it was written and committing their personal knowledge to paper are probably long gone.
I can't find the citation but a few years ago I read online about the digital archives of a UK newspaper that had been focused on labor issues. They put the back issues online and threw out the paper ones. Then, IIRC, something happened with their web hosting and they chose to delete a bunch of those issues entirely, thus removing that perspective on UK labor history from the record entirely. What I read insinuated that the current leader of the organization wanted it that way. I'll keep looking for the link.
Good book review. Only I think I either needed less, or more, about Cox's rebuttal.
Marginalia: It's helpful to distinguish between major research libraries and the average public or even small academic library. The former have an archival function and should collect and keep the obscure material that will only rarely be consulted. The latter need a small, up-to-date collection that is constantly being pruned and weeded. Like a garden, actually. Otherwise it will quickly be drowned in archaic best-sellers of yesteryear that the general reader doesn't want any more, and that, if needed, should be consulted in research libraries (or bought on the used-book market).
Then Baker is his own strawman, because his distaste for microforms starts with the reasonable and then passes on to the ludicrous. And yes, you can get many of these things from public libraries. Many larger public libraries carry microform sets of material they could otherwise never own, and as for the rest, ever heard of a little thing called inter-library loan? Microforms can go on that where many originals can't.
I am a hand bookbinder. I have done complete restorations on books from the 15th century to today. A couple of points I know from personal experience. One is that the wood pulp paper that was common for a century-plus starting in the early 1800s is complete garbage. Yes, if readers were super careful with the book, it was seldom handled, and it was always properly stored, it would still be OK. But a well-loved adventure book from the turn of the century will have half its leaves falling out, and trying to mend or repair that super acidic stuff is terrible. A second point is that librarians are often the worst enemies of books (no offense to any librarian readers here). I have worked on loads of books where a library perforated their name onto the title page, stamped their name in big purple blotches throughout the book, or had a 300 year old book cheaply rebound in buckram by a commercial binder. These are not acts of loving care. Yes, major research/specialty libraries have staff conservators and hand binders. However, as this review makes clear, exactly what librarians deem worthy of that treatment changes over time. I recently put a period leather binding on a very valuable three volume set of Plato from 1578 that had been bound in mid 20th century black cloth. At least there were no library stamps or perforations.
What you're up against here is the different professional needs and aesthetic standards of librarians and bookbinders. Both are doing the right thing for the needs they're addressing.
I don't agree about "aesthetic standards." Librarians are not making decisions on that basis. Professional needs, maybe. But let's not pretend that these are all equal; irrevocably damaging or destroying a book might serve a professional need, but that does not mean it is an ultimately defensible choice.
Your phrase "irrevocably damaging or destroying a book" is exactly what I mean by different aesthetic standards. By library standards it is not damaging or destroying; it's preserving and making useful. I don't expect you to understand that; you're a bookbinder. But if I tell you that, to librarians, bookbinders of your type look like bizarre fetishists, you may realize the gap. I don't endorse that judgment, by the way: I comprehend that there are different aesthetic standards at work here. I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same and not say things like "irrevocably damaging or destroying a book."
I apologize for unclarity. By “damage or destroy” I meant a metaphysical claim about persistence and corruption, not an aesthetic one. This is not just a bizarre fetish of bookbinders, but also of book collectors. The irony is that many of the great libraries were founded by collectors: Matthew Parker, Robert Cotton, J. P. Morgan, Paul Getty, Henry Huntington, etc. In any case, this a great discussion! I am literally at Cambridge Univ. this minute doing research on aesthetic choices in art restoration.
I suggest that your "metaphysical claim" is an aesthetic standard. Nothing is being destroyed that librarians see of value in a book.
Collectors, yes; they're in the same category as you are. And those libraries you mention are staffed by librarians who take the aesthetic standards of collectors into account. To their collections, they don't do the things you complain about. But that also means they have to keep their collections under very tight control, because the principal reason for putting ownership stamps on books is to make them less vulnerable to theft.
Oh, aesthetic choices in art restoration - yes, another deep topic and one which has given rise to many irreconcilable conflicts. But all I know of that topic is what I've read casually.
I must confess that this book review made me quite upset. Not so much because of the content as much as the "conspiratorial tone": "Did you know that librarians are really trying to cheat you out of your precious paper copies? They are so bad!"
A few things -- I completed my MLS (Master in Library Science) in 2013. Since then, I have been doing my MA and then PhD in a different field and been reliant on library collections as a researcher. Librarians, with all there quirks -- and boy are there many -- are a lot more heroic than this lovely review likes to suggest. A few thoughts:
1.) To read this review is to believe that librarians were wholesale throwing out books left and right and that one can no longer find significant numbers of physical books anymore. Not true. The main "victim" of microfiching was always newspapers, not books. Libraries have been very careful to preserve physical copies of book collections. The only "books" where I haven't been able to find physical copies but have been able to find microfiche versions are of dissertations. (Which aren't books.)
2.) The book reviewer speaks of one of the defenders of doing microfilm: "His main argument is that libraries can’t keep everything...He doesn’t explain how libraries managed to find enough money to do exactly this up to the 1950s"
So, first, this involves an extreme underestimation of the exponential growth of library collections after the 1950s. This wasn't linear growth in the postwar period. This was massive, explosive, exponential growth. And space: let's talk about space, since this reviewer seems to think it is so plentiful.
Yes, space is always available to be purchased. But not always at the price and location where one wants it. For example: the New York Public Library long ago ran out of space. And space in Manhattan and the surrounding Burroughs has not been cheap. (They've even dug deep under Bryant Park behind the main branch to make space.) They ended up having storage in New Jersey -- because it was actually affordable. But this involves shipping materials back and forth and it can take a bit of time. And boy, do patrons get really mad when they can't get what they want and NOW! [Lest you think this only is a problem for the NYPL, think a bit about property prices in Washington, DC -- or Cambridge, MA -- the location of two other storied library collections in the US)
So second: Microfilm is as much about convenience -- I can get it now, I don't have to wait for it. Which is important for a world where patron (*cough* customer *cough*) is King/Queen. And New York Public Library just could not afford to keep half as many physical newspapers as it could microfiche in its main branch. [Btw, this convenience factor also extends to physical libraries in small Illinois towns where real estate is cheap such as the University of Illinois -- they also have remote storage]
And third: let's say that NY Public library did keep that Prague Newspaper Kafka published in in print form. They wouldn't dare ship it across the country to a university in South Carolina to allow a student there to look at it for her research. But they would allow microfiche to travel that distance. Because it was a copy. [Based loosely on a true story] Microfiche -- before the computer, before the Xerox machine -- this was also about democratization of access.
3.) Paper -- paper has its pros and its cons. We've just read a review of a book that fetishizes paper as the greatest of all media. And let's be fair: it is a great medium. No question. But as this review allows, but doesn't fully appreciate, not all paper is created equally. Important: not all newspapers used the same quality of paper. Let me just say that I have been in the bowels of a library and seen a crumbling newspaper that they wouldn't touch, because they hoped to figure out a way to preserve it for future generations and not hurt it before they secured the funding.
Yes, the New York Times provided a nice rag/cloth paper edition. That's nice. But do we lack access to copies to the NY Times today? Digital, microfiche or paper? This isn't about the NYTimes. This is about the radical Yiddish newspaper from Cleveland that ran for twenty years in the early twentieth century. And the queer independent newspaper that didn't pay its staff and had to get cheap paper to print-- "Rag what?" they would ask.
[I would also suggest someone look at Steven Hale's comment about wood pulp paper.]
4.) Destructive preservation: let's be clear, there were destructive forms of microfiching that took place. There are also destructive forms of digitalization -- although anyone who takes a course on this in library school today is informed that this is the nuclear option. And this was, in hindsight, not great. This is something that the library community -- the limited parts I have had access to -- regrets.
5.) But what is this review *really* about? I actually don't think this review is about microfiching as such. It is really about an anxiety about digitization. Although only briefly touched on in this review, I take this to be the real anxiety driving the hand-wringing about all those bad librarians throwing away books. (A brief look at the comments confirms this suspicion) And I understand the underlying anxiety: but I can't read my paper book anymore. I don't want to read an ebook. What happens if Amazon decides to delete my ebook from my Kindle! [Has happened] A simple internet search reveals how widespread this anxiety is. I understand these anxieties.
Yet paper fetishization can not allow us to be blind to the many virtues of digitization. (In my research, for instance, it allows me to search whole swaths of 19th- and 20th-century German-language Jewish newspapers and find things that I never could have even seen 15 years ago. And all without having to go to fifty different libraries that each only contain piecemeal collections of each of these newspapers.
And the need for lots of copies -- including of digitally-born products? Librarians are thinking about that, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS)
In sum, I apologize for this long post, but I think it's important to be a little less hysterical about librarians playing executioner with our precious collections. Preservation of and access to cultural products has never been more rampant, and we largely have librarians to thank for that. Have they made mistakes -- yes. But some of these mistakes start to look a lot less like blatant mistakes than like decisions with pros and cons if understand all the factors in play.
Thank you, this is by far the best comment on the review! It's absurd to frame librarians as evil agents who love to destroy book.
From my humble experience with universities libraries, they really hate destroying books. Before they do it (e.g., when a professor retires, her part of the library gets dissolved), they offer it to the staff, to the students, to whoever still wants it. But most of the books end up being destroyed anyway. And I don't think that most of them are digitalized, except for the bestsellers and the modern ones.
The review (and/or Baker's book) really misses the main point. It makes it sound like the options are "destroy books" or "not destroy books". But the amount of space is limited, so the options are "destroy 80% of the books" or "destroy 80% of the books, but still have half of the destroyed ones on microfilm". I am sure that Baker points out some real mistakes in the process, but I got the impression that librarians figured them out long before Baker.
You write, "destructive forms of microfiching ... was, in hindsight, not great. This is something that the library community -- the limited parts I have had access to -- regrets."
As I noted earlier, I was told in library school in 1980 - over 20 years -before- Baker's book was published - that destroying the originals while microforming was a bad old idea that had ceased in the 1950s. So Baker's claim that it was continuing on full-scale into the 1990s came as a great surprise to me, and the reactions to the book I heard from library specialists in preservation gave me the impression that Baker's claims were at least selective and misleading. That was certainly true of his frets about the loss of card catalogs, which dealt with my own professional specialty.
I think several of your points have already been addressed in advance in the review. For example, as to microfilm being more convenient than paper:
> Despite its downsides, microfilm had the major advantage that it could be copied at will, which made a bunch of rare items suddenly accessible to libraries all over the country. Baker often stresses that he has nothing against the technology as such, as long as it is used merely to supplement paper collections.
As for destructive preservation, the library community might be reluctant to practice it now (?). However, as recently as 1988, 10 years before Baker's book, they were still perfectly comfortable with cutting books up - otherwise, they wouldn't have filmed the procedure and included it into a documentary which was then broadcast all over America (as explained in the review).
And as for space, the very next sentence after the one you posted is quite relevant:
> In the end, [Cox] forfeits his entire argument when he mentions in passing that working in Austrian libraries is relatively tedious because they hold so few items in microfilm. Indeed, at least in Europe, librarians seem to be managing the impossible task of storing a few copies of every historical publication quite well.
Space is an issue, which Baker apparently agrees with as well, but if you (non-destructively) image a bunch of old newspapers, then you can easily store the physical copies in a Library of Congress warehouse somewhere in Utah. Whoever needs the actual paper newspaper - to make better-quality copies of the illustrations, or to analyze the paper itself, or do some extensive search that is hard to do with a digital version - can take the plane to Utah, just like researchers still travel all around the world to consult rare manuscript material or archaeological material for their research projects.
1.) The cost associated with maintaining two copies (physical & microfiche) of everything can be cost prohibitive. That said, what you propose is actually done sometimes. The Big Ten does this (see here: https://www.btaa.org/library/shared-print-repository/introduction) with print, largely academic journals. The problem with newspapers -- especially daily newspapers -- is the sheer volume. Moreover, it is not enough to simply let them sit in a warehouse. Temperature and humidity conditions need to constantly be monitored. And then, there is the process of recovering newspapers that are already too far gone. In a world of limited budgets, it is a question of priorities. (And, if we spend all this money saving some newspapers in both paper in microfiche condition, do we end up completely neglecting other newspapers because our budgets don't reach far enough?)
2.) "In the end, [Cox] forfeits his entire argument when he mentions in passing that working in Austrian libraries is relatively tedious because they hold so few items in microfilm" -- I don't have time to go back to Cox's original document at the moment, but this goes back to access vs. preservation. (Because the Austrians have limited budgets, too -- notice they aren't doing both.) My experience of European librarians is that they are more likely to sacrifice access for the purposes of preservation. I don't know exactly what is meant by "tedious," but I live in Berlin (which is also in the German-speaking world, but a different country) and conduct research for my dissertation here. In my experience, the consequence of Europe's better preservation policies is a noticeable dip in access for patrons. This goes back to my last sentence in the previous comment about decisions having pros and cons. I ask this, though: if you preserve something but make hurdles to accessing it too prohibitive, then doesn't this diminish the value of its "preservation"? (Or, you only let the "professional researchers" look at these rare artifacts, don't have microfilm for the everyday researcher, and have made research an elite task.
3.) Finally, I need to do more research, but based on a write up of the film from another source I looked at, I am suspicious of the summary this reviewer takes from the book. The review writes:
>> "The 1988 film Slow Fires, which turned its director Terry Sanders into a household name in American libraries, was one of the cleverest pieces of anti-paper propaganda ever made, and Baker devotes considerable attention to it"
Compare this to a review I found from the time from a library publication:
>>"The issue of microfilming is debated at length. Margaret Child, assistant director of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, points to its strengths as a low-cost, proven technology for preserving the 'informational content of books.' In contrast, historical novelist James Michener and historian Barbara Tuchman much prefer to use primary source material in their research. Tuchman's distaste for microfilm is evident, although she acknowledges its importance as a record of lost original documents."
Now, I know that this review mentions Tuchman, but the framing is different. In this Wilson Library Bulletin summary, it is portrayed as an issue that is debated. In the description cited in the review, it is characterized as "propaganda." I would like to do more research, but based on this, I want some more context about this destructive microfiching that the author sheds tears about.
I will end with this: my deepest concern with this review is the way it parrots a book that is clearly polemical without a true engagement with the polemical tone. There is somewhat of a promise by the reviewer to engage with this at the beginning of the review. S/he doesn't succeed, though. Polemicists are not in the business of nuance, and this needs to be accounted for by any review of a book with such a tone.
Wait, we use acid-free paper now? I've got plenty of books I bought in my teenage years (the first decade of the 21st century) and they are noticeably more yellow than the more recent ones.
It varies from press to press. Overall the paper used now is better than it was 100 years ago and worse than it was 300 years ago. True acid free paper is more expensive, and you can’t count on it outside of academic books (which are intended to last a very long time) or fine press editions.
I recently bought an "academic" (?) book, and was quite disappointed :
- I bought it "new", and it indeed looks untouched, but after a mere 20 years after printing, the pages have already started yellowing.
- At that price and size (nearly 1000 pages) they should have used a hardcover !
A 2nd "new" book bought on Amazon for lack of another option ended up arriving not only quite used up but clearly taken (stolen ?!) from a library ! I'm going to have to get to the bottom of this...
Still waiting for a 3rd book, not sure why the seller needs several weeks before even sending it...
Honestly I'm hoping for a sort of ranked choice voting system. But if I had to draw a line then currently I'd put it between Are We Smart Enough... and Order Without Law.
This was fascinating, and the book review I have enjoyed the most so far. But it made me smile to think of film (I believe Kodak TechPan was developed for microfilming) being described as unreliable and fragile. I can't tell you how many digital photos I have lost through corruption, crashes and simple obsolescence of a file format! Yet I can scan or wet-print a negative or slide I took 50 years ago and have a perfect image.
Deaccessioning is hardly a problem unique to libraries. Museums have been embroiled in similar controversies, and people in the musem and library communities tend to take a very paternalistic tone on the matter.
They also tend to see their role as a pedagogical one aimed at the general public, with much less interest in preservation or appealing to specialists.
This review has produced a strange effect on me. I would ordinarily be sympathetic to the topic, I hate the destruction and disposal of items merely because they're old and out of the fashion, and the review broadly makes me agree that what is recounted as happening was indeed a tragedy.
And yet I disliked it. I think it's the tone - the reviewer seems to absolutely agree with Baker on all views. But I don't think that the librarians involved were uniquely and comprehensively all book-hating barbarians who only wanted an excuse to chop up and throw away old books, magazines and newspapers.
The reviewer says "How did Slow Fires get away with showing the dismemberment of rare items to the public? By pretending that nobody wants to be doing any of this." Well, how does the reviewer know they were pretending? I haven't seen this film, I have no idea if it was all performances and crocodile tears, but at least consider it possible that some of the people involved genuinely were regretful about the necessity (as they had been taught it was) to destroy the books in the process of recording them. Attributing ill-will and malice to *everyone* involved in the grand project is too much, I feel.
This is, after all, the lure of modernity. We are living in the Space Age! We have all this shiny tech! We want to prove we are modern and relevant! So here is the futuristic method of preserving and accessing material, why *wouldn't* we want to use it? Instead of multiple bulky copies of dusty papers taking up space, we can have modern clean microfilms that are easy (in theory) to store, share, and move. Besides, it's not like other places don't have copies of these, anyway, so what is the loss?
I challenge everyone here who ever threw out a newspaper: did you ever consider that in fifty years time a researcher might be dying to have an original copy of The Weekly World News or The National Enquirer? So we should be a little more sympathetic to people of the past.
Whether Baker or Cox are in the right, I can't say, but I can definitely see why Cox would want to fire off a rebuttal called "Vandals in the Stacks?" in response to the charge that all the librarians and archivists were no better than the Golden Horde descending on the Rus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%27
As to the ban on giving copies of discarded books to the public or even the shredded remains of the guillotined books, I wonder if it has something to do with the stripped books rule? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book I have definitely seen stripped books for resale in second hand book shops, even ones with "if this book has no cover, it cannot be offered for sale" type warnings included on the front pages. Also, there seems to be a tax rule about remaindered books and inventory that may affect the disposal of books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commissioner I do think libraries probably are covered by some kind of contract with publishers where they can't just give away old stock to the public.
I think I probably have some sympathies to the unfortunate guillotiners here, despite the grave error the entire project represented in destruction of original sources, because it's one of the perennial accusations against Christians by some subset of atheists: they destroyed all the books! as in this silly book (er, I may elsewhere have written something of a negative review about it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age
So it is proposed that the wicked and obsessed Christians deliberately destroyed as much of pagan Classical learning as they could because they were just that big of meanies. See palimpsests, which get much play in this debate - scraped off the genius works of old in order to write over them with boring old sermons! But the real explanation tends to be more complicated https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/the-disappearance-of-ancient-books/
So therefore my sympathies are invoked on behalf of the misguided who thought they were preserving by destroying and I am less inclined to ascribe to every single one of them a sinister policy of book-hating and deliberate, knowing, destruction.
Well-done review, but made me hate the original (unread by me) book 😀
A small point: the church can’t be blamed for every book loss, but they can for some. When Calvin burned Michael Servetus at he stake for heresy, his followers also burned every copy of Cristianismi Restitutio they could find. Only three copies survive.
Censorship became more important after Gutenberg. When books are rare as hell, handwritten on scrolls, and most people are illiterate, then they aren’t much of a threat to those in power.
The books being trashed comes down to "almost no one is evil, almost everything is broken."
People really don't want the old books, despite the busybodies who will show up and be shocked that a library discards books. They don't want the books themselves, they insist someone *else* does, but they are almost never that someone else.
To avoid these busybodies and avoid exhausting emotion tirades, libraries just have to create a brick wall of "trash it all, no questions, do it where no one can see." And we probably do lose a few quality and valuable things here. The first step to fixing this is to start giving librarians more slack to let their judgment be trusted.
I don't think it's fair to say that anyone thinks librarians are "evil". The review never says that they were evil or book-hating, and I don't think Baker claims that either. It does talk a lot about laziness and starry-eyed techno-optimism, the same things you mention as well. "Pretending" in the quote above can also mean "pretending there is no other option" rather than "pretending that they don't enjoy destroying books for its own sake."
In the review, there are a few links to places where librarians discuss how and why they destroy books. None of them invoke the stripped-books rule or copyright, so I don't think this is an issue here (also, why would this apply to books 100+ years old, and to newspapers). What the librarians write is mostly that selling/donating books takes a lot of time and effort, and it's easier to throw them in the dumpster, so that's what they do.
Good point, but I would argue that a major component of being "evil" is consciously wanting to do harm to others. The dictionary definition might be unclear, but this is how I think most people understand the word. Someone who does bad things because they are (self-)deluded or lazy, but doesn't *want* the bad things to happen, isn't evil. Hence the saying just below, "almost nobody is evil, almost everything is broken."
I found the review as interesting and well-written as everyone else here. Just wanted to make a small point about Brasilia. By the most inclusive definition of skyscraper (at least 100m), Brasilia has only one of them (the Central Bank) or two (depending on whether Congress is considered 100m or 96m). If we adopt the definition of 150m, there are no skyscrapers at all.
Residential buildings are all six stories or less. Legend has it that the architects wanted a height such that all parents could call their kids at the street for lunch from the window.
Curiously, very few structures are ever torn down in Brasilia.
Because digitizing things takes time and labor (= money). We have Google Books, archive.org, the Library of Congress digital collection, and many others. Hopefully more stuff will continue to be made available, but demanding *everything* comes off as greedy.
Where can you get a book digitized for $1? That doesn't add up. Just the physical act of scanning, say, 200 pages, should take longer than one dollar's worth of time at minimum wage, not counting overhead and other costs.
I agree that some of the vast sums of money that the government spends would be better given to libraries, but if your expectations are this unrealistic I expect you wouldn't be happy with the results of a larger library budget either.
This is $1 per 100 pages rounded up, not $1 per book, more than that for a higher quality scan such as you would need for archival preservation. Still, it looks remarkably cheap for what it is - the biggest cost is the destruction of the original, which is what would keep me from using it in most cases.
Would have been nice if some of those hundreds of millions were spent on lobbying congress to redress the deficiencies in the laws that killed google books. Compulsory licensing and limiting copyright terms to 20 years.
Not to be too nitpicky, but I'd point out that the "Obama memoir is more historically interesting than a wal mart catalog" is exactly backwards. I've read catalogs from 1883, and they're fascinating glimpses into the real lives experience of the people.
Not just what they bought, but how they spoke, viewed themselves, how they idealized themselves. What they desires and what ailed them.
I can't say I've ever bothered to learn jack about uh...
*Googles*
Chester A. Arthur. Couldn't tell you a damn thing about him.
Obama seems important now, but in 2250? He'll be as notable as Chester A. Arthur. He'll probably get a footnote as the first black president, but otherwise?
People barely learn about Teddy Roosevelt anymore, and he was an astounding president.
Great review! In my opinion the reviewer's message is profound. We should protect our legacy in all the ways possible. Thank you for trying to show us "the bigger picture".
I'm late but I really enjoyed this one and want to compliment the author. Great choice of book and outstanding review! The Book Review contest seems to be a huge hit, at least I am enjoying this a lot.
Late to the game, but excellent excellent review. Struck the perfect balance between coverage of the book, its critics, and personal opinion. Damn well written too.
I strongly take your point about eleventy zillion copies of the New York Times. I often read old books and the list of "hit novels from 1911 that nobody would possibly be interested in today" where you get the publisher's advertisement for "our forthcoming novels by Charles B. Whosis and Cecily Whatte-Herr, author of "Tilly's Trottings" and "The Risqué Rake Rebuffed" are fascinating glimpses into the past, but I somehow doubt that it is easy to find a copy of them - not because sinister librarians cackled as they ran them through a shredder and dumped the pathetic remnants in the dustbin, but because they were popular hits of their day and within ten years nobody cared about them. The equivalent of the back-catalogue of Mills & Boon or Harlequin Romances.
On the other hand, places like Project Gutenberg which *have* put up digital copies of old and hard-to-get books are a godsend to me (as was Amazon in its early days - the thrill of finally being able to order a copy of a book that I had been unsuccessfully trawling second-hand bookshops in vain to get!). Yes, I'd love to have a paper copy of such-and-such a work, but if I can't get it any other way than online, then I'm happy to get it that way, rather than languish in the knowledge that there *might* be a copy on some library shelf in another country.
This was surprisingly fascinating! The closest I've come to contacting this issue myself was that UC Berkeley required me to submit my dissertation on archival quality paper, but I think all years since mine (2008) have been allowed to submit electronically. I'm pretty sure someone is still producing an archival quality hard copy from those electronic submissions.
This is the one thing that makes me a bit hesitant to suggest that academic journals should switch to low-cost all-electronic open-access formats.
I knew there was something wrong with Baker's thesis when I read the book on its first coming out. Because when I was in library school in 1980, twenty years earlier, we were told that discarding the originals after microfilming them was a bad old idea that wasn't being done any more. Microfilming was for improving access (you can make copies of the microfilm and send them anywhere), not for preservation. De-acidification was the coming thing for preservation, at least then.
Baker also thoroughly misunderstands the double-fold test. He says that if you don't want the paper to break, just don't fold it that way. The idea of the double-fold test is as an early warning system, like the canary in the coal mine. It tells you which paper is most brittle and most needs attention.
That reminds of a time in grad school when I found an old medical textbook from the 80s on a discard shelf. I flipped through it and found it chock-a-block with gorgeous black and white anatomical drawing. All very out of date and quite useless from a factual perspective. So I razored the illustrations out and used them as my Christmas cards that year, combining holiday greetings with some nifty facts certain bits of neuroanatomy.
First though I did check the textbook’s resale value on Amazon, as I recall ~$10
Oh, that might explain why the other day I found a 2500 pages Textbook of Surgery (1981, 12th edition) literally in the street ? (I still have it.) Do these books go outdated so fast that a merely 40 years old book is considered "out of date and useless" ?!?
P.S.: To compare with the latest edition 20 year old Physical Statistics book that I just bought and that AFAIK is still suggested as the best reference by my old teacher.
Thanks for the more up-to-date look. Chemical deacidification was still considered a promising avenue of research development in my time in library school 30 years earlier. (I didn't keep up on this because I did my professional work in other areas of librarianship.)
"what is the argument exactly for a public library to keep it forever?"
1) Public libraries are more accessible than research libraries.
2) If public libraries are not responsible for preservation, who is? As mentioned in the review, the Library of Congress is not a perfect record.
It is worth noting that a large part of Double Fold is arguing that archives etc. have failed in their duty of preservation.
The comment on public libraries preserving local history is also revealing - it suggests there is no one else to preserve stuff...
The counterpoint is that if noone else thinks preserving "Learning Windows Server 2008" is worth it it will be entirely lost.
Baker's thesis is that this is a bad idea. Your school taught you the same thing. I'm not sure I see what is wrong.
I also don't see where in the review it says that Baker claims "f you don't want the paper to break, just don't fold it that way". He is claiming that the double-fold test is inaccurate. His "page turn" experiment shows that a book with a very low DFV can survive a lot more usage, so it seems the librarians were exaggerating that point. But on the other hand, if the librarians were only using it prioritize which books to save (books with a higher DFV have a higher time-to-live), then Baker's experiment doesn't disprove that.
What is wrong, Anonymous, is that Baker says this microfilm-based discarding was still going on full-throttle into the 1990s (and so says the review here, in the 2nd paragraph). I was told in 1980 that it had been discontinued in the 1950s. Something is wrong here.
The double-fold test wasn't intended to prove that the book can't survive much more usage. It was intended to identify which books were most fragile and most needed preservation. But my personal experience with researching in books that wouldn't survive the double-fold test is that they flaked bits all over the place and easily tore pages if readers weren't very very careful. As a naturally clumsy and awkward person I found this difficult.
I see. His thesis was that destroying the originals after microfilming them was wrong. That he may have gotten the end date wrong doesn't invalidate his thesis, in my opinion. Just to be clear, when I say thesis, I'm referring to his central argument, not his entire book.
I'm not sure how to reconcile your experience with what he said though. Perhaps it was still going on in a lot of libraries, but there were places where people had stopped? I could imagine it takes a while for approaches to change. Or he could be just wrong :)
Interesting data-point on the the double-fold test. It could be that it was not very predictive (i.e., some books with a low DFV were on their death-bed, others weren't).
[There is no edit button] I think the fact that his book wasn't presumably flaking shows that there is at least one exception to the double-fold test.
I'm not disputing the thesis that destroying the originals is bad. But in Baker's book, that thesis is inextricably combined with his denunciation of libraries for doing it - then-current libraries. And as far as I knew, that denunciation was unjustified.
I'm puzzled by your apparent belief that the fact you were taught in library school in the '80s not to do this means that nobody was doing it since the '50's. Clearly that is not true, and the proof is all the missing originals- right?
As Baker gives absolutely no indication that the destruction did anything other than continue full-throttle through the 1990s, and I know for a fact that the library profession considered it bad practice at least 20 and probably 40 years earlier, something is wrong in Baker's picture.
And since I also know for a fact that some of his other complaints, such as the one about missing information in computer conversion of card catalogs, have no basis in fact -in good library practice-, I think I see what he's doing: combining his own ignorance and his discovery of some flawed practice and attributing it to a system-wide failure that doesn't exist.
Thanks, There are some reviews on amazon that say a similar thing. https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/REWBEWPB9FQJP/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000FC1HRI
My question is of it was considered a bad practice in the 80s, why did Cox write a rebuttal that argues that it was not a bad practice? My only exposure is this article, so I'm honestly confused.
That's not what Cox said. He does say that some materials need to be weeded out - and all librarians would say that - but he does specifically say that the wholesale destruction of the originals of microformed newspapers was wrong - and that's what I was taught as well.
I think more than one person has pointed out that, from the strict point of view of preservation, paper beats almost anything, including film and electronic storage. A well-tended well-made built will easily survive with 100% of its information intact for 200 or more years. That is certainly not true of *any* film and *any* form of digital storage. (In terms of digital storage, beyond ordinary bit-rot for any magnetic medium we have the problem of the technology needed to read even things like pressed CD-ROMs vanishing. Anyone with 5" floppy disks formatted in some ancient DOS format knows this.)
s/built/book/ bah
Yup. Lack of dependencies is a pretty amazing advantage.
Digital has its own advantages too, of course, like easy replication and search for known text. But for archiving, a paper master that gets copied into new formats as needed is pretty much ideal.
There's an amusing theme in Fred Pohl's "Heechee" saga, in which tons of alien artifacts are discovered and called "prayer fans" because they look kind of like partially rolled fans. They have little value, are sold as curious and decorations, no effort is made to preserve or study them.
At some point in the saga, humans meet the Heechee themselves, and ask WTF are these things you left all over the place? The Heechee frown and say "Books, of course. Did you not think to try them in one of the reading machines we also left all over the place?"
I could show a USB drive to someone very savvy about computers in 1945, and unless it was in the right context I doubt it would even occur to him that it might be an information-storage device. One hopes we don't have the same problem with respect to the future -- but then, here *we* are wondering WTF the point of Stonehenge was.
Technically, they learned it from Wan (a human boy raised by partially insane uploaded humans on a Heechee space station), but your point stands.
That's deeply nerdy and impressive. Until you reminded me, I had forgotten that wretch's name.
What's truly bizarre is that I haven't read those books since high school, yet I still managed to retain that plot point.
All the librarians I've worked with (as one myself, though not personally involved in preservation) know that digital storage is not archivally stable. It's useful as term backup and for access distribution. But then, the librarians I've worked with know and knew a lot of things that Baker says librarians don't know, so I'm pretty skeptical of Baker.
I mean Baker makes specific references to named individuals in this, that seems easy to check on. The book was first published nearly 20 years ago, it's entirely possible that standards might have changed since then.
It's not "since then," it's 20! years! earlier! I was in no position to research all of this, but I'd guess that Baker's description of these named librarians was very misleading, and that's the impression I got at the time from what better-informed librarians than I said about the book.
Geez sorry, this was not at all clear from your comment.
I see you mentioned the date in the earlier thread. My apologies.
I think it's worth pointing out that you can usually get a few people on record to say things that aren't necessarily representative of the whole community they claim to represent.
I don't see why the obvious answer isn't just "both". Keep printed books around for long-term archival and as historical artifacts; use digital for ease/speed of access and massively parallel redundancy. Each use case supports the other.
And that's what all the research libraries I've worked at do. It's only Baker who says they don't do it.
So then what happened to all the books? His entire book is a fabrication and it took some dude an entire other book to just say "everything he says is a lie"?
I've been out there in the library field. This is what happens. Baker is at best selective and misleading. Writers do that sort of thing all the time.
Is there reason to believe that the ancient DOS format issue will continue to be a thing? I always thought that those were mostly just early chaos due to information technology being unexplored or the limitations of early readers, and as time goes on the formats for data (as well as the quality of archeology software) will become more and more stable. PDF standard was openly released in 2008 but we have the documentation from its first releases in 1993, PNG was invented also in 1997 and standardized in 2003, and as far as I know it's possible to recover the text even from really old Word documents, with no reason why this would become harder over time.
20 years isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but at this point it would surprise me if information on file formats was lost at the same rate as during the 20th century, with the amount of information and software that is kept.
Sure. If you've stressed because you've forgotten an important password from not using it for a while, you understand the problem. It's not just that data formats become old, it's that they get *forgotten*. While a technology is all the rage, it's so ubiquitous that nobody thinks to carefully make and store away archival copies, to to speak, of the archival process itself -- with a helpful glossary of even things that are "obvious" at the time -- so that the future can readily read the records of the past.
Yes, I would guess that almost anything stored in 2008 can be read today, with at most a moderate effort. But what about the world of 2250? What are the chances *they* will know the PDF format sufficient that they can (1) recognize and distinguish it from the other umpty formats that will have been used over the next two centuries? and (2) decipher it perfectly?
We are in uncharted territory here, to some extent. Heretofore the only "equipment" needed to read records of the past was the human eyeball and visual cortex. And even then, we have had problems when languages evolve and/or are forgotten, or records were thrown away or destroyed. *Now* we have not just the durability of the records themselves to consider, but the durability of the interpreting equipment, the preservation of the knowledge of the protocols.
Yes, one would *hope* that standards settle down, but taking a look at the history of, say, USB connectors, or how we store and access music, is not encouraging. How many of us have bought high-quality vinyl, then duplicated it in CDs, then spent man-weeks ripping and digitizing things -- and then subscribing to a streaming service? It's notoriously hard to predict the future of consumer technology.
You probably know about this, but the concerns you mention are all ones that motivated the creation of the Rosetta Disk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project
It requires magnifying lenses to read, but no electronics, and contains a very clear visual clue about the nature of the content and the fact that it's very tiny.
There's also a version that you can get as a necklace
https://rosettaproject.org/disk/wearable/
to try to make it more likely that many copies will survive in multiple places.
I did not, and that is a very cool project. Thanks!
I'm sad that they only have made 100 copies, with seemingly no plans to make more since 2017...
Not only is it a fantastic artifact but I just honestly wanted one.
Let's assume that technological progress continues -- DOS floppies were replaced by multi-page TIFF files, which were replaced by PDF files, which will be replaced by who-knows-what. Given that, it seems like any digital document archive needs to have some sort of "regular upgrade" process in place. None of those storage media/formats vanished overnight. There's always a period of, I dunno, but let's say ten years where equipment and software to read the old formats are widely available, and converting to the new format is relatively easy. (As one example, MS Word version n can generally read files created by Word version n-1, and probably n-2 and n-3, as well.) On top of that, the new formats are generally cheaper and smaller, so there should be good incentives to do the conversions.
I know pretty much nothing about professional archiving, so maybe this is already standard practice? I would hope so. But I still see lots of people worrying about old formats, so I wonder.
Of course, this doesn't address all of the points. The look and feel of actual 5.25" floppies can't be replaced with a PDF file -- just like paper can't be completely replaced by any digital format. But if the goal is to archive content, then regular updates/conversions should work.
It should, yes. But we're assuming an efficiency and forethought among human beings that is a little dubious. I mean, heck, *I* have a VHS tape somewhere of my wedding. I dread what would be required to read it and digitize it, and if I delay enough I bet there's a tolerable chance my great-grandkids will be unable to see it.
A more important point, perhaps, is one that is stressed in the review, which is that we do not always know at the time the decision has to be made what is worth preserving and what is not, according to the standards of the distant future. For example, the reviewer says it's obvious that we should preserve the autobiographical musings of Barack Obama and not this weeks Walmart catalogue. I can easily imagine that 250 years hence they would think that an insane choice: a Walmart catalogue from 2021 would (for them) contain a treasure trove of information about 2020s technology, tastes, and economics. Obama's musings over issues that, for them, are as dead and boring as the burning question of whether Quintus or his older brother Marcus was going to succeed to the praetorship in 106 BC is to us.
Digitizing VHS's is pretty easy - get a VHS player (you know, the kind with the red, white, and yellow plugs) and then buy a $30 USB adapter from your preferred online retailer.
They still sell VHS players? Whew! I guess I can put it off for some more years...as is the nature of humans, I'll only get to it when the situation is barely recoverable.
> the reviewer says it's obvious that we should preserve the autobiographical musings of Barack Obama and not this weeks Walmart catalogue.
Pedantic correction: the reviewer does not say this. They say the memoirs are more important than the catalogue, not that the catalogue shouldn't be preserved.
Historians will value the Walmart catalog, but only because *of course* there will be ample records of the President's memoirs.
Well, PDF/A is an archival format (it's what the A means), and hopefully the archivists that designed it were aware of these issues ?
Another problem is that PDF, despite it's name, and unlike, for instance (M)HTML, is not a format appropriate for electronic documents... but hopefully the Internet Archive is saving web pages for at least the medium term (~100 years) too ?
[Disclaimer: I work on PDF processing software, so I'm pretty familiar with PDF, but also have a vested interest in it.]
The "not a format appropriate for electronic documents" is a common view, and somewhat misleading in my opinion. I prefer to say that PDF is good for some things, and not so much for others. If you have a static document, a Word file or whatever, and you want to make it widely available to people who don't have (a specific version of) Word, don't have the exact fonts you used, etc, then PDF works great. PDF is terrible as an editable format. It's also pretty bad if you want to reflow to fit a smaller screen, though I think this is becoming less of an issue as phones get bigger.
PDF (as a format) is a little more constrained than HTML. I'm not really confident that I'll be able to read a 2021 HTML file in 2031. Heck, I can't always view a 2021 HTML on every single 2021 browser -- lots of weird little compatibility issues with CSS, JavaScript, and so on. On the other hand, I'm pretty confident that I'll still be able to read a 2021 PDF file in 2031.
I'm less confident that I'll be able to read a 2021 PDF in 2121. Maybe we'll all be using holographic brain implants or something, and maybe Adobe went out of business 50 years ago, and no one has bothered to write PDF viewer software for the brain implants, because we're all using the whizzy new XYZ document format.
I think the key is to take advantage of the period where PDF overlaps with XYZ, and make a point of converting everything over. That leads to all sorts of questions -- do we really need to convert *everything*, who's responsible for converting, who supplies the holographic disk space, etc.
I wonder if the Internet Archive is doing anything along those lines? When they save a particular web page, I think they're saving a verbatim copy, CSS quirks and all. How do we make sure that's viewable in 2031 and 2121?
PDF seems to have pretty bad support for animations -
(GIFs are obsolete, MP4 support is a crapshoot depending on reader, and we should be moving to AV1 for rasterized pictures and animations soon anyway... BTW what support does PDF(/A) have for vector pictures and animations ?)
- and also maybe for interactive animations, though it seems to have built-in JavaScript support (which sadly might be a security issue).
Yeah, I went back to a pretty cool website recently, and since it used Flash for interactive animations...
http://resonanceswavesandfields.blogspot.com/2007/08/complex-phasors.html
HTML at least can be easily edited (these days from inside the browser itself in real time !) if there's an issue, and I expect to be able to read the UTF-8 text inside an HTML file with the simplest of text editors for a long long time...
It might be interesting to look at DVI support as a potential future of PDF ?
There may be some way of incorporating animations into PDF, but I wouldn't want to count on that working across viewers. Best to think of PDF as for static documents -- things you could print on a piece of paper.
PDF certainly has support for (static) vector drawings. It's more sophisticated (or overly complex, if you like) than SVG, for example.
PDF/A is a subset of PDF. Essentially it disallows use of some features and puts restrictions on other features, with the goal being to get PDF files that will work reliably across different PDF viewers (and presumably across time).
Is there reason to believe that the ancient DOS format issue will continue to be a thing?
I always thought that those were mostly either limitations of early readers, or chaos due to information technology being unexplored and every company reinventing the wheel on their own in a different way. As time goes on, wouldn't one expect that data formats become more and more stable, and as available data grows, the quality of archeological software that can open a lot of formats increases? PDF and PNG are both 20-30 years old already, and even ancient text documents are still mostly legible, though some require work to get there. Do you expect a 2015 picture to be difficult to read in 2030?
The challenge is that mostly the popular formats are what gets saved and a lot of other stuff just rots and fades into obscurity. PDF and PNG and ASCII and UTF-8 text (and even some more obscure encodings) will probably remain legible, but what about Deluxe Paint files? What about magazine layout files from old versions of Quark?
If you follow the Video Game History foundation you can learn a whole bunch about all these issues and more, which a focus on video games specifically (the situation feels a bit bleak sometimes)
https://gamehistory.org/
At the risk of being annoyingly object-level, Deluxe Paint files are in a fairly well-documented file format, and a bunch of actively-maintained tools can read them -- netpbm, ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick, various others. The source code for the ones I mentioned is out there and should be easy enough to keep running for a good long while.
Old versions of QuarkXPress should run under emulation, and as far as I know have always been able to export PostScript files, which are plain text, widely readable, etc. If I'm wrong about that for the earliest versions, a pre-OSX Mac emulator with a virtual LaserWriter printer should be able to get the same effect.
I'm skeptical about the danger of old file formats, as long as emulators exist and people keep copying archives of old software onto new storage media. None of that is hard; it just takes a non-zero amount of effort, and so is often neglected for more obscure stuff. A quick look through the VGHF's blog makes it sound like the problems are less about old file formats and more with things just not being preserved at all except as a decaying set of floppy disks in a collector's basement or some ultra-rare NES cartridge hidden away in a secret room in the Vatican.
I know plenty of people who have opened old Quark Express files and have lost all kinds of formatting information. Frank Cifaldi at the Video Game History foundation went over this a while back, where he had layout files from old game magazines, and even pulling out all the stops and calling on all his considerable connections, plenty of formatting information was simply lost in the churn.
Also:
as long as emulators exist
This is a big, big, big, if.
Don't even get me started on emulation. We're doing a pretty good job on this, but emulation is far from perfect, and it's typically only for mega popular platforms (e.g. Nintendo consoles) that we get the years of necessary obsessive effort to reverse engineer, decap, etc, to get cycle-accurate emulation.
Only recently have we gotten the Original Xbox to any degree of acceptable emulation, and likewise the PS3, and neither of these are perfect replacements for the originals. Even when games seem to "run fine", all sorts of subtle timing errors creep in that make the game look, play, or sound differently than the original that are clear when you put it side-by-side with the real thing, but otherwise you might not notice.
And don't get me started on how all of the original consoles were designed with clever visual effects tricks that only work on cathode-ray-tube displays with specific refresh rates and phosphor blending that you still can't reproduce with perfect fidelity on most modern displays. Even with fancy "CRT Filters", to even approach reproducing some of the original effects reliably on an LCD panel you need to have at least 4K resolution.
My point is not that we aren't preserving some things, it's that often we aren't even aware of the fidelity we're losing.
There's a project to document all sorts of file formats: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/
The most longevity you will probably get with current technology for digital storage (implying microscopic storage) is something like M-DISC:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1193057-REG/verbatim_98914_bdxl_100gb_4x_m_disc.html
Basically the idea is to not use a volatile organic material for the data film inside the disc (big surprise). I really doubt the quest for a real archival quality digital format is over, or that there are no good options just because the digital media we have now are ephemeral. Digital technology itself is practically ephemeral compared against the "arc of history".
The best archival macroscopic digital storage (taking about the same space/mass as the equivalent ordinary book with the same info density) is probably going to be a stack of thin gold plates.
Your own link shows that M-DISC is pretty average compared to Syylex :
https://web.archive.org/web/20140530021132/http://www.syylex.com/the-glassmasterdisc.html
(Ironically, that company seems to be dead ?)
Yes the company is dead. Is it a prerequisite that the original proprietor must exist during the entire mean lifetime of the storage artifact for it to be legitimate?
I did not see any reference to Syylex in my research so far. They do not seem to have any discs for sale (at least not in North America) whereas M-DISCs are available for $$$. Also many burners advertise M-DISC compatibility.
But the reference is right there in your link ??
"The performance was: [...] much less than glass DVD technology (Syylex) which was rated "more than 1000 hours".[15]"
What exactly do you mean by "well-tended," and what does it cost? Yes, copying your data to a new medium and checking its integrity occasionally is an ongoing expense, but so is keeping books in physical storage and protecting them from fire, weather, etc. For sufficient values of "well-tended," *any* medium will last 200 years.
I suspect the differences in how careful you have to be are enormous. I have a scrapbook my mother made for me 50 years ago when I was a tot, full of photos and her notes and whatnot. I have done absolutely nothing to take care of this other than keep it out of the rain, and it's almost as good as the day she made it. On the other hand, I have mag tape records of computer programs I wrote 25 years ago which (1) I have no idea how to read, would certainly require very expensive resurrection or construction of an obsolete tape machine technology, and (2) has probably accumulated a fair number of errors from entropy, so who knows if it's readable at all?
"paper beats almost anything, including film and electronic storage."
This entirely discounts backups, storage capacity, cost unfairly favoring paper.
A terabyte is something like a million books (around 100K words each), including some metadata. It costs... pretty much nothing, and will cost even less in the future.
Take libgen. Is it less resilient than similar collection on paper? How would you even go with making a backup of that on paper?
Yes, there are outlandish scenarios where humanity suddenly collapses or something. Through I don't see it happening universally across the globe WITH 'book preservation' being of any concern at the same time.
The terabyte itself isn't expensive, just like digging a hole and putting the books in the big mylar bag in the ground isn't expensive.
What file format are you using? How often are you checking the hard drive? What is your plan for when the hard drive fails? How will you detect failure ahead of time?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/the-lost-picture-show-hollywood-archivists-cant-outpace-obsolescence
There are armies of professionals working on this who have though of it more than you and me put together. These are people doing it at scale and it's still expensive.
It's not that simple for film vs digital :
https://petapixel.com/2019/05/02/film-vs-digital-this-is-how-dynamic-range-compares/
(Though maybe digital will keep getting better until it's better than film in almost all use cases ?)
$50/To/year is not as bad as I would have thought !
Only 200 years is not great, and pales compared to burned clay tablets which lasted millennia.
> When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked.
You're going to use approval voting [or similar], right, not actually just "vote for your single favorite" with all the problems that entails...?
He should ask people to indicate which reviews they've read and which they liked, then have the one with highest % liked be the winner.
Well, that could present a problem with reviews that only a few people read I guess (small sample size).
Also that people are more likely to read the good ones. I only get a few paragraphs into some, halfway through others, and only finish a few. Obviously correlated with which ones I liked. How should that be indicated?
Solid review, checks all the boxes:
- Presents something I didn't know I was interested in and makes me interested in it
- Provides a solid & readable summary of the book's best arguments
- Contextualizes it for the modern reader and addresses some common criticisms
- Assesses what the reviewer's own conclusion on the matter was
I noticed in a post once that the Internet Archive goes out of its way not to guillotine material and has a fancy and presumably more expensive scanner that works page by page and requires a manual operator, wouldn't be surprised to see if they've read this book or just came to the same opinions on the matter.
This made me pause tonight's tasks. Very interesting read!
I stopped reading this review twice, because I became so enraged. To me, this is culture wars material. I have seen university librarians reduce the size of the collections to create more "thinking space", or because a new online system was expensive or we needed more computer labs for students who already own computers. One local library reduced its collection simply because they reduced the height of the shelves in order to serve the Frank Lloyd Wright aesthetic of the beautiful new building.
This review reminded me of two stellar short works by librarian Peter Briscoe: Reading the Map of Knowledge which concerns the art of librarianship and is a paean to those glorious few librarians who love real physical books and do themselves read voraciously. He also wrote an elegiac novella called "The Best Read Man in France" about a book collector who has been putting together a rare collection of North and South American Early Colonial Scientific Treatises and Researches by Jesuits. It's a melancholic meditation on the fate of historical knowledge in modern society.
How did you make this so thrilling to read? Its an argument about proper data storage and how fast acidic paper decays. And a methodological point that how they tested paper longevity was biased. I should not have been excited while reading this, but I was. I kept expecting somehow to shout Objection! or confess betrayal on a rooftop in the middle of a storm.
Thanks, this is interesting.
I mean, it probably helps that we're all gigantic nerds.
But yeah, quality review - well done, OP.
Oh my! That was beautiful, and tragic. Thank you. As an undergrad in late 70's I spent much free time prowling the stacks of my university library.
I have not read the book reviewed here ("Double Fold"), but this review makes it sound pretty one sided, and the review does not challenge it.
There does seem to be a consensus today that "destructive preservation" was a bad idea, but there is very little consideration here of economic and logistical pressures which presumably pushed (some) librarians in that direction.
Regarding dumpster books today, my understanding is that these days the large majority of de-accessioned books in the USA are sold or donated to at-scale efforts like Better World Books, who sort and variously re-distribute internationally; sell used on Amazon; donate to other libraries; destroy/recycle a final fraction of books. If you look in the dumpsters it is mostly best sellers from decades past, of which there are hundreds of thousands of duplicate unwanted copies. It seems pretty efficient and heterogeneous (eg, "the market", librarians, independent organizations, and collectors all get to take a pass before something gets binned).
Nick Basbane's book "Patience and Fortitude" (2001; strong recommend overall if you skip any chapters boring to you) has some segments in the final section ("Book Places") about weeding into off-site warehouses, preservation (microfilming and digitization), and the SFPL main branch. Basbane is ultimately on the "keep books", but I thought presented both sides of several debates reasonably.
"Edition of One" (1990, available to borrow at https://archive.org/details/editionofoneauto0000powe) is the autobiography Eugene Power, who founded University Microfilm (now ProQuest) in Ann Arbor, and was involved in the early days of microfilm as a business. Interesting history, though there is a lot of personal history to skim over. The early days seem to have centered around microfilm as a distribution and low-cost publishing tech, as opposed to preservation and paper-replacement.
I have several family members who are / were librarians at various institutions. It is to be noted that this is not US, but yeah process is similar in the generic city public library here. Copies that do not get picked from the carts go to recycling. Sometimes copies deemed uninteresting are recycled directly, never making it to the cart.
One of the aforementioned relatives related how that part of the job felt quite depressing when it came to discarding nonfiction and magazines / journals. Another remarked they felt it was silly to order such large amounts "hot" popular entertainment reading of the day to only discard it some years after.
Nothing is supposed to be permanently lost on national level, as at least one copy of each title are supposed to be held at the national book repository, available through interlibrary loans. Naturally, national library receives and supposedly archives copies of everything published in the country. Old newspapers were digitized relatively recently, and digitized version were of quite good quality. Don't know what the situation here was during the time period described by the reviewed book, though.
However, there is the issue practical availability and resilience by redundancy. Concerning redundancy, fires and catastrophes happen. In archiving sense, keeping only one copy around sounds like living dangerously.
Practical availability is another thing. One and only copy of a book on the whole continent that stays in a climate controlled repository and is recorded in the database, but requires particular effort by a professional of its publishing era to find because next to all other books that cite it and books that cite them sit next to it in the same repository ... well, that book is not exactly as dead as the one whose whole print was destroyed, but the climate control there is not unlike a ventilator. It is a very different from the book that is available in their nearby library. It is very different from the book that is put on display on front desk next to card "books related to the [insert theme of the month], please take".
Not everything can be selected to be available in every library (because that is the nature of selecting things), but there is power in having the ability to select and weed out some books that thus became increasingly rare.
I myself collected a very nice professional home reference library of 1960s to 1990s and some 00s applied math and physics textbooks by regularly checking the give away trays of all university libraries in the nearby metropolitan area. I am uncertain what to think about the implications (other than, good for me). University libraries do not need old textbooks much when professors assign more current editions. On the other, content in these fields very rarely goes bad. At worst, latest developments are missing or the results that are true simply do not interest anyone, because the application domain marched on. On the other hand, there is lots of remarkable information in old textbooks. For example, undergraduate (not to speak of graduate) program textbooks appeared to have more difficult problems sets than what was assigned by teachers.
> There does seem to be a consensus today that "destructive preservation" was a bad idea, but there is very little consideration here of economic and logistical pressures which presumably pushed (some) librarians in that direction.
Hey there bnewbold!
This is a great point. In the lead-up to writing *Double Fold*, Nicholson Baker got into a very public fight with librarians about removing physical card catalogues.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/04/04/discards
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/14/the-author-vs-the-library
It's true that the card catalogues in some places were very beautiful and in most cases had involved a lot of labor to create, but the argument that they would be a good use of library space and librarians' time in the future feels bizarre to me at this distance, and Baker didn't seem to have a lot of interest in thinking or talking about the limitations and pressures that the librarians were facing!
Oh, the card catalogs. That was a matter I was directly involved in, as my job as a librarian was converting card catalogs to electronic form. Baker's argument was that a lot of valuable information, often specific to the individual copy, was preserved on catalog cards that didn't get transferred to electronic form. But he was mistaken. For one thing, when I did the job, at least, that information got transferred. For another, he seems unaware that, even after discarding the main card catalog, the library preserved a master card catalog in the back workroom called the shelf list, and those cards had not only the information Baker was concerned about, but more information, e.g. on acquisition dates, that never appeared in the public catalog at all.
Ditto this final comment. Another thing to add: I also know of cases where card catalogs were kept when the digitization of their content was never fully completed (because of cost constraints.) Librarians I have worked with are very careful about this.
That happened to me also. I was in charge of one catalog conversion that wasn't finished due to lack of time and money.
Reviewer clearly stated if you want "opposition" of Double fold you should read Cox.
That doesn't seem sufficient to make it not one-sided. The reviewer tells us where to find another side, but they only occasionally actually give us another side.
What matters is the end result : are these newspapers & journals still accessible or not ? In how many copies ? If not, what was the failure point ?
My wife, formerly a librarian for King County (the nation's largest library system), had never heard of this book, which has me wondering exactly how ubiquitous the book is among the profession.
I’m a librarian, too, and had never heard of it, either. Although I trained as an archivist- maybe it was a bigger hit among reference librarians?
Brief review-of-the-review:
I appreciated the effort to take a position here while giving the other side's arguments their due. I'm sympathetic to the position, too-- take that, High Modernists! But I think it's oversold a little here. The loss of old materials is frustrating but not a horrific harm to human flourishing in the way that, say, urban planning and agriculture policy can be. Also, the advent of good color digitization makes the microfilmers look basically right in principle, though 50-some years premature. Modern computers get around all of the microfilm drawbacks that the review mentions. Even so, this was a very effective, readable summary of Double Fold and a fun window into a bit of history and society that I had no idea existed.
> Modern computers get around all of the microfilm drawbacks that the review mentions.
Well, most of them!
I agree that digitization has gone in a direction that undermines or dodges a lot of Baker's criticisms. And it's also sometimes made books *more* useful, because OCR lets you search quickly for particular terms (in an individual book or a whole collection), and perform statistical analyses and everything. Like it made possible the Google n-grams corpus.
But the review mentions the "mummy paper" thing, where you might not know at first what physical properties of a book are going to appear important or interesting in the future. And it also feels hard to me to get a consensus on what kind of resolution (or illumination) is sufficient for posterity. One thing I've noticed over and over again is that new recording and reproduction technologies feel awesome and impossibly realistic when they first come out, and then in retrospect often feel kind of crummy when compared with newer technologies. Like the first time I saw a 640x480 scanned photograph on a computer, I said "wow, this is photo-realistic!". But that same photograph would definitely not feel that way to me today.
So someone might choose a particular number of dpi, or a particular color depth, or other aspects of the scanning process, and conclude that it's perfectly adequate as a substitute for the physical book, but maybe with the advance of technology we would no longer view it that way. I know for paintings there's been an effort to photograph them more and more and more accurately, for example so that people can study the details of individual brush strokes. The fact that it's even possible to make a photograph allowing this kind of close study probably wouldn't even have occurred to most people a few decades ago.
Maybe this is especially relevant for books that contain various kinds of illustrations and artwork: one might say that a preservation-quality scan should be at least comparable to the fidelity of whatever the printing process was that produced the imagery in the physical book. (And that varies from book to book, or century to century!)
I'm not trying to make a kind of mystical argument that *no* degree of imaging fidelity could ever be sufficient for preservation—although I guess that's kind of true in the narrow case of things like the mummy paper thing, or maybe people want to use old paper to calibrate curves of C₁₄ for carbon dating because it's a product of trees stamped by humans with specific individual years of harvesting—but more just point out that it's easy to look at something and say "wow, that's beautiful and incredibly detailed; how could anyone ever want more detail than that?" and then have this judgment go stale after a few more years of technical progress!
Seems like the obvious answer is to designate a few (geographically distributed) archival libraries that are dedicated to keeping original paper copies of everything, complete with climate-controlled storage and whatever else is needed. Then we can go back every however-many years and re-scan with the latest technology.
The fact that this seems so obvious to me almost certainly means I'm missing something. Ok, this would be a really expensive project, and who wants to spend all that money on old newspapers. But is there something more than that?
Wow, I was just talking about *Double Fold* on the phone with a friend last night (!!).
I loved the extra context and analysis that this review offered. Really a terrific and thought-provoking discussion.
This reminds me of various things:
(1) I remember feeling that Baker underrated digital scanning, which could be done to much higher standards than microfilm scanning, producing a much more usable, accurate, and appealing version of a book's content. I think this has proven true; even though most of his attack is against microfilm, I recall that he was also pessimistic on digitization, which seems like a criticism that hasn't aged as well. There are legitimate criticisms of digitization, but it's mostly been a humongous improvement compared to microfilm.
(2) The part of the book that explains that older paper is *much more durable* than, um, middle-aged paper—as the review explains—came as a big revelation to me, since I'd seen cheap pulp paperbacks falling apart in my hands at merely 40 or 50 years of age, but meanwhile my father's bookstore had books that were hundreds of years old that seemed pretty much fine. Since our intuition about most things is that older will translate to more fragile and worse condition, this is really important and counterintuitive even for people who like books a lot but have never studied paper or preservation.
After reading Baker's explanation, I've pondered and mentioned to friends that the oldest book I own (the New Testament in Greek edited by Mills, published 1787 in London) is totally fine and you can easily read it by hand just as you would read any modern book. This despite the fact that it's *the same age as the U.S. constitution*. (It was rebound in cloth, in what looks to me like the 1940s or so.) This is a powerful reminder of Baker's point that eighteenth and nineteenth century paper is *awesome*.
(3) I remember the librarians' anger at Baker over this book. I met one librarian when this came out who said "this man who writes softcore porn has a lot of presumption in telling librarians how to be custodians of culture", or words closely to that effect. (This is a reference to *The Fermata*, Baker's 1994 erotic timestopping novel.) According to my friend who works for a major library system, some librarians have never forgiven Baker and still feel offended by his criticisms to this day.
(4) Regarding the dumpster issue:
> Many other books were, however, simply trashed. As a combination of bizarre rules, bureaucratic stubbornness, fear of publicity, and simple inertia, it’s apparently very rare for American libraries to simply donate discarded books to the public. Sometimes the books are sold, but usually they are thrown into the dumpster, regardless of their value.
My father was able to save a lot of books by discreetly asking librarians when they were going to put deaccessioned books into the dumpster. I think he said that, if he asked nicely, they would even put the books *next to* the dumpster rather than inside it. Presumably everything about this varies a lot from library to library—in terms of the quality, condition, and scarcity of what's deaccessioned, how the individual librarians feel about it, and how willing they are to cooperate with people who want to grab the books and give them a new home—but the "fear of publicity" part rings true to me. I think the librarians my father knew did not feel that any book lover would like to see, or even think of, books put out in the trash, even as a result of a reasoned deliberation by librarians about how best to serve library users.
I don't know how deaccessioning has changed over time, but it may still be possible in some places to ask for a heads-up and try to grab some of the books on their way out. I still have the impression it would be best to be discreet about that! But I bet computer cataloguing and online retailing have somewhat reduced the extent to which rare books end up in the trash, because it's so much easier today to check whether something is unusual and/or economically valuable.
FWIW, this claim appears to be false: "After 20 years, the book remains universally known, sometimes admired but often despised, among librarians."
I'm a public librarian by trade, I've never heard of this book, nor heard anyone discuss it, or even it subject matter. Doesn't mean it isn't known by many, but clearly not universal.
I will also add that in many jurisdictions, government instutions are *not allowed* to donate books (I know this is the case for universities in Washington State, for instance). The idea seems to be that this is "wasting taxpayer dollars" or something. Therefore, any books that are deaccessioned are, by law, required to go in dumpsters.
I can assure you that most academic librarians in these jurisdictions are not happy about this (they would MUCH rather donate them to anyone who wants them) but it's not their call.
Cynically, I would speculate that the reason some government institutions are not allowed to donate books is to stop dilution of the market for new copies or printings of the book, and that these laws (or policies) are due to lobbying from copyright holders. At a minimum it would be better if works could be donated if they were in the public domain or "orphaned" (copyright holder can not be identified or reached).
I have a Library Science degree, and there are some constraining factors here. Just adding more shelf space is a lot harder than this makes it sound, and most library systems have *no money* for this. The librarians know the last time someone looked at an item in their collection; quite often it’s been decades. They can’t keep all of this copious, bulky material at the expense of new titles and risk stagnation. They have nowhere to put the damn stuff and no one will give you money to build infinite climate-controlled warehouses for books and papers that haven’t been checked out in decades.
How did libraries manage to do it before 1950? In the early 1900s, there were about 10,000 unique titles issued by recognized publishing houses in the US each year. That number in 2010 was over 300,000. Add in all the niche, indie and on-demand titles and you’re talking millions of titles. Every year. And that’s just books.
Is paper still the best storage medium going? Of course. Is it a tragedy to lose the entire run of a paper due to technical or coordination failures? Absolutely. But I don’t believe it’s physically possible for even the most well-heeled and interconnected system of libraries to keep everything we’ve been generating for decades, especially when those materials have been sought out by exactly no one in a human lifetime. The alternative to preservation by destruction in most cases wasn’t preservation, it was just flat out destruction.
I dunno that I find it persuasive that it could be done in the early 1900s because there were far fewer new titles. It was also the case that in the early 1900s the US population was of order 75 million (versus 330 million today) and the economy much smaller. One would reasonably suspect that the *resources* of the libraries of the 1900s were proportionately smaller than those of the libraries in 2010, so 10,000 new titles a year in 1900 might be just as hard (or easy) to store as 300,000 new titles a year in 2010.
What you would need to argue is that, for example, the *ratio* of new titles to population (or GDP) has grown significantly since the 1900s, or the ratio of library resources to population/GDP has fallen. Neither of these strike me as a priori obvious: as a nation, I rather suspect reading and books (and libraries) were a lot more important on a per capita basis in 1900 than they are today. *Today* you can get along in much of life without reading books much better than you could then -- there's speaking devices and videos and recordings and Wikipedia and Google and Siri and so forth. What ordinary citizen needs to go to the library to look at books any more?
Actually, I should revise that to say that while I'm a little doubtful that the library resources per capita would fall *of necessity* I'm very open to the argument that they have fallen *by choice*. That is, as a society, we simply don't care to spend the money on libraries and library-related things the way we used to, because we don't use libraries nearly as much.
But this doesn't necessarily contradict Baker's point, because it's a *choice* not something that was inevitable. Of course, one doubts that librarians themselves were in favor of that choice, so blaming them seems unreasonable.
Let's say that the national budget for libraries has increased proportionally with the national population, and that the national publishing output has also increased proportionately.
The main way this plays out with municipal and academic libraries is that there are more individual libraries, not that every individual library gets more resources. Each individual library is faced with an every growing corpus of books to purchase from. If each library was some perfect shard of a national system, then they could work together and cover everything, but each library is expected to mostly supply popular books, which are mostly the same books everywhere.
The counter example is something like Library of Congress, which has grown and has very deep coverage. But note that it is mostly closed stacks: they don't have nearly enough copies of each work to lend them out even in a single town or city, let alone the whole country.
Some of the efforts I have heard of that mitigate this are: offsite storage with rapid retrieval (cheaper than storing in a regular branch location); library systems, consortium, and national catalogs, which help distribute the burden rare/unique books across many libraries, with access via Inter-Library-Loan; specialization of individual libraries; centralization into huge "main branches" which have grown over time; etc.
But there is a systems dynamic that more people means more books, but doesn't mean more money for individual libraries to purchase a significant fraction of those books. This problem is particularly acute for academic libraries subscribing to journals. Any "respectable" research library is expected to subscribe to "all the important research"; as the number of universities and research institutions grows, the volume and cost of "all the important research" goes up, but the individual institutions are overwhelmed. In this case everything is mostly digital, so it is purely an economic crisis.
Well, sure, but this seems a little tangential to the main question, which is one of archival storage of things that people rarely access. We're not talking about keeping up with the best-seller list, right? *That* hasn't grown much. So...why *couldn't* an increasing number of individual libraries split the burden? Inter-library loan for rare stuff, et cetera. I mean, surely more libraries are now part of big systems, no? Town libraries become part of county systems, et cetera.
Not saying it *actually is* done that way, but if it *could* be then, again, this is a choice, not something inevitable.
As an archivist, I think you’re underestimating the expense involved here. Keeping books on shelves is not free. We’re talking about some seriously vast facilities here, and they need careful management. Even if you put them in some magically ideal-for-books climate, you need to ensure that they’re protected from all kinds of environmental factors. That’s before you get to maintaining the bibliographic records that tell you what you have, not to mention staff, assuming you want to find and access these items ever again.
I got from Library Science into IT via digitization, and I know how many times I explained to people that creating and maintaining digital copies of things, or even metadata related to them, was not free or even cheap.
This is an issue that goes far beyond libraries; I was once sent to examine digits property records in a midsize midwestern city. A task that should have taken hours took days because we discovered that the original 19th century handwritten property record books had been poorly digitized, the index numbers at the top of each page lopped off by the scanner. Nobody had noticed this in *ten years* and the originals had been destroyed. But the town registrar had the same problem as everyone else; no space, no funding, and an obligation to accept the low bid from vendors.
The extent to which people, or societies, are making choices here is debatable. It’s the same kind of coordination problem as afflicts every other aspect of life, and it’s also extremely hard to accurately value any individual piece of paper below a certain threshold. Archivists have a rubric for defining value and determining what gets kept and for how long. Most of the paper and content we produce simply does not meet that threshold.
I wasn't addressing the expense, only (initially) the argument that the *absolute* amount of paper published governed the challenge of long-term storage -- I argued that one would have to divide that number by the overall wealth of the society to see how the *relative* amount of paper (relative to overall resources) has changed. Secondarily, I doubted that it is not possible for libraries to in principle coordinate their archival function, such that more libraries indeed translated to a larger resource base for that function.
Since I didn't esimate the expense, I can hardly have underestimated it, but I take your point that the details of how it's down would be sobering. I mean, that's kind of true for almost anything: those of us who know the details (in our area of expertise) find it annoying that other people assume it ought to be easy-peasy to do better by deploying This One Weird Trick which I just thought of in two seconds, tops. I'm sympathetic to the annoyance of the expert at the near universal 21st century devaluing of hard-won wisdom based on experience and the concomitant over-valuing of a facile ability to craft a reasoned argument based on a light skimming of Wikipedia articles.
One resource has not grown exponentially: land. A hundred years ago, if Columbia wanted another 20k sq ft of Harlam for a specialized library, that was no big deal. It was a sleepy little New York suburb and land was cheap.
One could imagine a massive archival library in Montana with paper copies of everything, but it would only be accessible to researchers determined enough to fly to Montana.
I suppose the Montana facility could have the one guy with the camera in his headband, and if someone wanted to read something they'd get on Skype and he would sit very still, slowly moving his head while the client read off the screen thousands of miles away.
We could surely get Boston Dynamics to whip us up a reader-bot. Honestly, I love the idea of a massive warehouse (or set of warehouses) on underused land where we store physical copies of all the books and papers. Maybe even build a couple of them to protect against fire and nuclear strikes. But I don't know who's paying for it.
Maybe you could piggyback on the seed vault in Svalbard?
> and risk stagnation
I would also point out that for many libraries, over time this can also turn in to an *existential* risk to the organization, and potentially to the material collections it is responsible for. If patrons (the public, private funders, whoever) are not using and continuing to see the value in a library, they are much less likely to continue funding it and defending it in other ways. A large "dark" (not accessible) preservation collection can easily become a collection nobody knows or cares about, and that nobody will be upset about shutting down and shredding entirely.
This line of argument (institutional self-preservation) can of course be taken too far, and I do personally think some libraries are going too far in the "fewer books" direction (because I think the public generally loves having lots of physical books around, even if they are not touching or reading them). But I am frustrated by people who think "real librarians" should prioritize books over public access and design. I think effective long-term planning requires strong and diverse support in ever-changing society.
Don't art museums have a similar problem? I think the Met has about 5x as much in its collection as it can display. I don't know what the library equivalent of rotating your collection and having special exhibits to boost awareness is. This Week Only! Come See Our Unique Collection of Early Superman Comics!
> The librarians know the last time someone looked at an item in their collection; quite often it’s been decades.
They know when an item was last *checked out*, but do they keep records of everything that gets taken off the shelf? (Genuine question. For all I know it's standard practice for research libraries to record every book that gets re-shelved.)
I have been asked in more than one university research library to place all books I pull off the shelves onto a return cart, instead of re-shelving myself. When I asked the librarian said it wasn't just because they didn't trust folks to re-shelve in the right spot, but also wanted to know what materials were being browsed. I'm not sure if they scanned barcodes or something to record this digitally, or just got a feel for it on a human level when re-shelving.
Yes, they scan barcodes. This also has to do with storage. If they notice that lots of people are perusing a book, it is less likely to go to offsite storage, because they now know that they will spend a lot of time shipping it back to main library campus. But if something is rarely looked at based on the data, it is more likely to go to offsite storage, because they know they won't have to ship it back as often.
Thrilled to see this almost forgotten book reviewed. The microfilming insanity was on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and Baker is a true hero. I was stunned while I read the original, and then stunned again at the vicious response by the library community. It ended my love of librarians.
"The microfilming insanity was on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and Baker is a true hero."
Oh my friend, that is a terrible analogy to make for your argument 😁 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXwDHnixc0
Has anyone looked into deep learning based super resolution systems? Baker's juxtaposition of the full color and the black-and-white blobs could be used as training data.
For any low resolution image, there will be multiple plausible reconstructions of a high-resolution original. I'm not sure that any information gained in this way would be reliable.
You could generate & show all plausible reconstructions.
I wonder to what extent the events chronicled here inspired Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End." A major plot arc of Rainbows End is a slightly-futuristic version of this: books being outright shredded, because the cheapest way to digitize books was to scan the shredda and geometrically reconstruct the pages.
I, too, was reminded of Rainbow's End. Underrated book that I highly recommend, and very relevant to this post.
The National Library of Australia has a very nice online collection of newspapers, imperfectly OCRed: e.g. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/126584988
I remember going to the library with my family as an elementary school-age child. Once I'd found the Red Dwarf VHS I wanted to check out and bring home, I had little to do. I usually ended up at the microfiche machines scanning through archived versions of our local news paper looking for the funny pages.
Maybe the technology was better by then (1990s), but I don't recall finding the images to be of low quality or difficult to read.
I think there was a large range of quality. I've definitely seen some iffy ones when I was scrolling through microfiche of 1950s-era newspapers from a small Western city looking for obituaries of relatives.
I'm not convinced.
I've never seen much empty shelf space at a library. Approximately every volume acquired means a volume let go. Microfilming it first is better than not.
The dominant use of microfilm was newspapers. They were printed on the cheapest paper of the day and they don't do the anaerobic thing as well as books. For that matter, they don't sit neatly on a shelf like books. And they're an absolute nightmare to re-assemble if some reader is less than careful. I remain unconvinced that a century of newspapers in their original form was ever a practical thing for a library to make available.
Microfilm may not have been a great format, but it's what was available and it's easy to scan to something more modern.
The answer to your objection is already in the review. The newspapers were bound together in large volumes. It wasn't just loose pages.
"Several newspapers, such as The New York Times" did this. Presumably the rest did not.
NYT did the special print on durable material for archival, but newspapers (all kinds of papers) can be bound by people who have them. Older books have got rebound often. Some people bind their comics.
Covers of a book are relatively unimportant, and without them, a book is a stack of printed leafs and surprisingly similar to ... a bunch of newspapers. This is how the trope of wealthy aristocrats having a library with books that look exactly the same came to be: it used to be a thing get a book and rebind it.
Actually originated in the days when books were sold unbound. The purchaser would then get it bound separately. Aristocrats getting all their books bound in identical covers became a thing then.
Is that why "Don't judge a book by its cover." is a thing?
Daniel's concerns about the unpracticality of newspapers applies to the bound volumes (bound by the library, not the original publisher) as well as to loose papers. They don't sit neatly on the shelf because the volumes are big and awkward, and the crumbling paper easily falls apart as the pages are turned. The result is a nightmare. Baker's one valid point is that they're much easier to browse through than microform - if they're physically hardy enough to stand it.
It does seem that there was a lack of planning in terms of how to create a networked system of information preservation. If even five places in the country got together to divvy up who would keep a complete archive of which papers, we could still have that complete archive and know about it even if it was not all in one place.
If anyone has ever dealt with genealogical records and had to look at old, crooked microfiche of obituaries in newspapers, you know that sometimes the last, or first, paragraph is cut off. Often enough for it to pose an issue. Even if "film is generally good," on a case by case basis a flawed film is not better than an old paper copy. It isn't wrong to face the loss.
I've also seen subsequent printings of books take out parts, say of an introduction, that later generations might not like and publish it as if it were the same thing. My memory retains the earlier pages, but what else does? I go forlornly to the volume and flip through, trying again to grasp where those strange paragraphs once were. There are competing impulses, the impulse to edit and improve something, and the impulse to hold on to it as it is, so later we have a door into what those a**h***s were thinking.
Honestly, 1980s-era math textbooks are a treasure trove. Pre-common core, problem set after problem set, lucid explanations. I have a feeling that once those are gone, they'll be gone, because after all, what is special about a math textbook? Yet one of the most important stories of modern times is told in the progression of changes to those books, and without that record the story will sound very different.
Additionally, maybe some people here know people who were involved in it, a year ago when the pandemic shutdowns were all on and state unemployment systems were bogging down because they'd never been modernized and now they had like one person on the staff who still knew Fortran or Cobol and they simply could not update the systems fast enough, and they were trying to get old programmers out of retirement to help. Knowledge transfer is important.
I see community libraries getting rid of books on a weekly basis. Twenty years ago when I worked shelving books in a local library, that library went by the date the book had last been checked out. I don't remember how long, but I think it was five years. If something wasn't checked out in that length of time it was "donated" to their nonprofit auxiliary where they were sold in a yard-sale type environment. I don't know what happened to the ones nobody bought.
I took a writing class from a less-well-known author in the 1990s. In that library in the early 2000s there were several of his books. In 2013 there were two and by 2019, one.
Where I live now, there are three trucks of "free" books out in front of the library doors every day. I don't know how fast they disappear, but I look at them once every few months and there is near-complete replacement. At least these are not being thrown out.
Last year I found a book of local history, created by a large group of volunteers and published in the 1980s by a community organization which no longer exists. It is an amazing book. It has a library of congress catalog number but is long, long out of print. The local community would benefit from this book but there it was being given away. I am confident in guessing that it was never digitized, and being that it was made 40 years ago, the people who were old when it was written and committing their personal knowledge to paper are probably long gone.
Whatever the profession says about their success, at least in Turkey, https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/15/europe/garbage-collectors-open-library-with-abandoned-books#:~:text=Garbage%20collectors%20in%20the%20Turkish,workers%20started%20collecting%20discarded%20books.
I can't find the citation but a few years ago I read online about the digital archives of a UK newspaper that had been focused on labor issues. They put the back issues online and threw out the paper ones. Then, IIRC, something happened with their web hosting and they chose to delete a bunch of those issues entirely, thus removing that perspective on UK labor history from the record entirely. What I read insinuated that the current leader of the organization wanted it that way. I'll keep looking for the link.
Good book review. Only I think I either needed less, or more, about Cox's rebuttal.
Marginalia: It's helpful to distinguish between major research libraries and the average public or even small academic library. The former have an archival function and should collect and keep the obscure material that will only rarely be consulted. The latter need a small, up-to-date collection that is constantly being pruned and weeded. Like a garden, actually. Otherwise it will quickly be drowned in archaic best-sellers of yesteryear that the general reader doesn't want any more, and that, if needed, should be consulted in research libraries (or bought on the used-book market).
The problem is that research libraries are much less accessible.
And the solution to that is portable microforms, and electronic access, all the stuff that Baker doesn't like.
This is a strawman of Baker, and you're not getting access to all that stuff from a public library anyway.
Then Baker is his own strawman, because his distaste for microforms starts with the reasonable and then passes on to the ludicrous. And yes, you can get many of these things from public libraries. Many larger public libraries carry microform sets of material they could otherwise never own, and as for the rest, ever heard of a little thing called inter-library loan? Microforms can go on that where many originals can't.
I am a hand bookbinder. I have done complete restorations on books from the 15th century to today. A couple of points I know from personal experience. One is that the wood pulp paper that was common for a century-plus starting in the early 1800s is complete garbage. Yes, if readers were super careful with the book, it was seldom handled, and it was always properly stored, it would still be OK. But a well-loved adventure book from the turn of the century will have half its leaves falling out, and trying to mend or repair that super acidic stuff is terrible. A second point is that librarians are often the worst enemies of books (no offense to any librarian readers here). I have worked on loads of books where a library perforated their name onto the title page, stamped their name in big purple blotches throughout the book, or had a 300 year old book cheaply rebound in buckram by a commercial binder. These are not acts of loving care. Yes, major research/specialty libraries have staff conservators and hand binders. However, as this review makes clear, exactly what librarians deem worthy of that treatment changes over time. I recently put a period leather binding on a very valuable three volume set of Plato from 1578 that had been bound in mid 20th century black cloth. At least there were no library stamps or perforations.
What you're up against here is the different professional needs and aesthetic standards of librarians and bookbinders. Both are doing the right thing for the needs they're addressing.
I don't agree about "aesthetic standards." Librarians are not making decisions on that basis. Professional needs, maybe. But let's not pretend that these are all equal; irrevocably damaging or destroying a book might serve a professional need, but that does not mean it is an ultimately defensible choice.
Your phrase "irrevocably damaging or destroying a book" is exactly what I mean by different aesthetic standards. By library standards it is not damaging or destroying; it's preserving and making useful. I don't expect you to understand that; you're a bookbinder. But if I tell you that, to librarians, bookbinders of your type look like bizarre fetishists, you may realize the gap. I don't endorse that judgment, by the way: I comprehend that there are different aesthetic standards at work here. I'd appreciate it if you'd do the same and not say things like "irrevocably damaging or destroying a book."
I apologize for unclarity. By “damage or destroy” I meant a metaphysical claim about persistence and corruption, not an aesthetic one. This is not just a bizarre fetish of bookbinders, but also of book collectors. The irony is that many of the great libraries were founded by collectors: Matthew Parker, Robert Cotton, J. P. Morgan, Paul Getty, Henry Huntington, etc. In any case, this a great discussion! I am literally at Cambridge Univ. this minute doing research on aesthetic choices in art restoration.
I suggest that your "metaphysical claim" is an aesthetic standard. Nothing is being destroyed that librarians see of value in a book.
Collectors, yes; they're in the same category as you are. And those libraries you mention are staffed by librarians who take the aesthetic standards of collectors into account. To their collections, they don't do the things you complain about. But that also means they have to keep their collections under very tight control, because the principal reason for putting ownership stamps on books is to make them less vulnerable to theft.
Oh, aesthetic choices in art restoration - yes, another deep topic and one which has given rise to many irreconcilable conflicts. But all I know of that topic is what I've read casually.
Some of those are surely anti-theft measures? I think that someone taking a scalpel to a rare book in order to cut out pages for re-sale is irrevocably damaging it: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/13/tome-raiders-solving-the-great-book-heist
I must confess that this book review made me quite upset. Not so much because of the content as much as the "conspiratorial tone": "Did you know that librarians are really trying to cheat you out of your precious paper copies? They are so bad!"
A few things -- I completed my MLS (Master in Library Science) in 2013. Since then, I have been doing my MA and then PhD in a different field and been reliant on library collections as a researcher. Librarians, with all there quirks -- and boy are there many -- are a lot more heroic than this lovely review likes to suggest. A few thoughts:
1.) To read this review is to believe that librarians were wholesale throwing out books left and right and that one can no longer find significant numbers of physical books anymore. Not true. The main "victim" of microfiching was always newspapers, not books. Libraries have been very careful to preserve physical copies of book collections. The only "books" where I haven't been able to find physical copies but have been able to find microfiche versions are of dissertations. (Which aren't books.)
2.) The book reviewer speaks of one of the defenders of doing microfilm: "His main argument is that libraries can’t keep everything...He doesn’t explain how libraries managed to find enough money to do exactly this up to the 1950s"
So, first, this involves an extreme underestimation of the exponential growth of library collections after the 1950s. This wasn't linear growth in the postwar period. This was massive, explosive, exponential growth. And space: let's talk about space, since this reviewer seems to think it is so plentiful.
Yes, space is always available to be purchased. But not always at the price and location where one wants it. For example: the New York Public Library long ago ran out of space. And space in Manhattan and the surrounding Burroughs has not been cheap. (They've even dug deep under Bryant Park behind the main branch to make space.) They ended up having storage in New Jersey -- because it was actually affordable. But this involves shipping materials back and forth and it can take a bit of time. And boy, do patrons get really mad when they can't get what they want and NOW! [Lest you think this only is a problem for the NYPL, think a bit about property prices in Washington, DC -- or Cambridge, MA -- the location of two other storied library collections in the US)
So second: Microfilm is as much about convenience -- I can get it now, I don't have to wait for it. Which is important for a world where patron (*cough* customer *cough*) is King/Queen. And New York Public Library just could not afford to keep half as many physical newspapers as it could microfiche in its main branch. [Btw, this convenience factor also extends to physical libraries in small Illinois towns where real estate is cheap such as the University of Illinois -- they also have remote storage]
And third: let's say that NY Public library did keep that Prague Newspaper Kafka published in in print form. They wouldn't dare ship it across the country to a university in South Carolina to allow a student there to look at it for her research. But they would allow microfiche to travel that distance. Because it was a copy. [Based loosely on a true story] Microfiche -- before the computer, before the Xerox machine -- this was also about democratization of access.
3.) Paper -- paper has its pros and its cons. We've just read a review of a book that fetishizes paper as the greatest of all media. And let's be fair: it is a great medium. No question. But as this review allows, but doesn't fully appreciate, not all paper is created equally. Important: not all newspapers used the same quality of paper. Let me just say that I have been in the bowels of a library and seen a crumbling newspaper that they wouldn't touch, because they hoped to figure out a way to preserve it for future generations and not hurt it before they secured the funding.
Yes, the New York Times provided a nice rag/cloth paper edition. That's nice. But do we lack access to copies to the NY Times today? Digital, microfiche or paper? This isn't about the NYTimes. This is about the radical Yiddish newspaper from Cleveland that ran for twenty years in the early twentieth century. And the queer independent newspaper that didn't pay its staff and had to get cheap paper to print-- "Rag what?" they would ask.
[I would also suggest someone look at Steven Hale's comment about wood pulp paper.]
4.) Destructive preservation: let's be clear, there were destructive forms of microfiching that took place. There are also destructive forms of digitalization -- although anyone who takes a course on this in library school today is informed that this is the nuclear option. And this was, in hindsight, not great. This is something that the library community -- the limited parts I have had access to -- regrets.
5.) But what is this review *really* about? I actually don't think this review is about microfiching as such. It is really about an anxiety about digitization. Although only briefly touched on in this review, I take this to be the real anxiety driving the hand-wringing about all those bad librarians throwing away books. (A brief look at the comments confirms this suspicion) And I understand the underlying anxiety: but I can't read my paper book anymore. I don't want to read an ebook. What happens if Amazon decides to delete my ebook from my Kindle! [Has happened] A simple internet search reveals how widespread this anxiety is. I understand these anxieties.
Yet paper fetishization can not allow us to be blind to the many virtues of digitization. (In my research, for instance, it allows me to search whole swaths of 19th- and 20th-century German-language Jewish newspapers and find things that I never could have even seen 15 years ago. And all without having to go to fifty different libraries that each only contain piecemeal collections of each of these newspapers.
And the need for lots of copies -- including of digitally-born products? Librarians are thinking about that, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS)
In sum, I apologize for this long post, but I think it's important to be a little less hysterical about librarians playing executioner with our precious collections. Preservation of and access to cultural products has never been more rampant, and we largely have librarians to thank for that. Have they made mistakes -- yes. But some of these mistakes start to look a lot less like blatant mistakes than like decisions with pros and cons if understand all the factors in play.
Thank you, this is by far the best comment on the review! It's absurd to frame librarians as evil agents who love to destroy book.
From my humble experience with universities libraries, they really hate destroying books. Before they do it (e.g., when a professor retires, her part of the library gets dissolved), they offer it to the staff, to the students, to whoever still wants it. But most of the books end up being destroyed anyway. And I don't think that most of them are digitalized, except for the bestsellers and the modern ones.
The review (and/or Baker's book) really misses the main point. It makes it sound like the options are "destroy books" or "not destroy books". But the amount of space is limited, so the options are "destroy 80% of the books" or "destroy 80% of the books, but still have half of the destroyed ones on microfilm". I am sure that Baker points out some real mistakes in the process, but I got the impression that librarians figured them out long before Baker.
Very good post.
You write, "destructive forms of microfiching ... was, in hindsight, not great. This is something that the library community -- the limited parts I have had access to -- regrets."
As I noted earlier, I was told in library school in 1980 - over 20 years -before- Baker's book was published - that destroying the originals while microforming was a bad old idea that had ceased in the 1950s. So Baker's claim that it was continuing on full-scale into the 1990s came as a great surprise to me, and the reactions to the book I heard from library specialists in preservation gave me the impression that Baker's claims were at least selective and misleading. That was certainly true of his frets about the loss of card catalogs, which dealt with my own professional specialty.
I think several of your points have already been addressed in advance in the review. For example, as to microfilm being more convenient than paper:
> Despite its downsides, microfilm had the major advantage that it could be copied at will, which made a bunch of rare items suddenly accessible to libraries all over the country. Baker often stresses that he has nothing against the technology as such, as long as it is used merely to supplement paper collections.
As for destructive preservation, the library community might be reluctant to practice it now (?). However, as recently as 1988, 10 years before Baker's book, they were still perfectly comfortable with cutting books up - otherwise, they wouldn't have filmed the procedure and included it into a documentary which was then broadcast all over America (as explained in the review).
And as for space, the very next sentence after the one you posted is quite relevant:
> In the end, [Cox] forfeits his entire argument when he mentions in passing that working in Austrian libraries is relatively tedious because they hold so few items in microfilm. Indeed, at least in Europe, librarians seem to be managing the impossible task of storing a few copies of every historical publication quite well.
Space is an issue, which Baker apparently agrees with as well, but if you (non-destructively) image a bunch of old newspapers, then you can easily store the physical copies in a Library of Congress warehouse somewhere in Utah. Whoever needs the actual paper newspaper - to make better-quality copies of the illustrations, or to analyze the paper itself, or do some extensive search that is hard to do with a digital version - can take the plane to Utah, just like researchers still travel all around the world to consult rare manuscript material or archaeological material for their research projects.
I will try to be brief.
1.) The cost associated with maintaining two copies (physical & microfiche) of everything can be cost prohibitive. That said, what you propose is actually done sometimes. The Big Ten does this (see here: https://www.btaa.org/library/shared-print-repository/introduction) with print, largely academic journals. The problem with newspapers -- especially daily newspapers -- is the sheer volume. Moreover, it is not enough to simply let them sit in a warehouse. Temperature and humidity conditions need to constantly be monitored. And then, there is the process of recovering newspapers that are already too far gone. In a world of limited budgets, it is a question of priorities. (And, if we spend all this money saving some newspapers in both paper in microfiche condition, do we end up completely neglecting other newspapers because our budgets don't reach far enough?)
2.) "In the end, [Cox] forfeits his entire argument when he mentions in passing that working in Austrian libraries is relatively tedious because they hold so few items in microfilm" -- I don't have time to go back to Cox's original document at the moment, but this goes back to access vs. preservation. (Because the Austrians have limited budgets, too -- notice they aren't doing both.) My experience of European librarians is that they are more likely to sacrifice access for the purposes of preservation. I don't know exactly what is meant by "tedious," but I live in Berlin (which is also in the German-speaking world, but a different country) and conduct research for my dissertation here. In my experience, the consequence of Europe's better preservation policies is a noticeable dip in access for patrons. This goes back to my last sentence in the previous comment about decisions having pros and cons. I ask this, though: if you preserve something but make hurdles to accessing it too prohibitive, then doesn't this diminish the value of its "preservation"? (Or, you only let the "professional researchers" look at these rare artifacts, don't have microfilm for the everyday researcher, and have made research an elite task.
3.) Finally, I need to do more research, but based on a write up of the film from another source I looked at, I am suspicious of the summary this reviewer takes from the book. The review writes:
>> "The 1988 film Slow Fires, which turned its director Terry Sanders into a household name in American libraries, was one of the cleverest pieces of anti-paper propaganda ever made, and Baker devotes considerable attention to it"
Compare this to a review I found from the time from a library publication:
>>"The issue of microfilming is debated at length. Margaret Child, assistant director of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, points to its strengths as a low-cost, proven technology for preserving the 'informational content of books.' In contrast, historical novelist James Michener and historian Barbara Tuchman much prefer to use primary source material in their research. Tuchman's distaste for microfilm is evident, although she acknowledges its importance as a record of lost original documents."
Now, I know that this review mentions Tuchman, but the framing is different. In this Wilson Library Bulletin summary, it is portrayed as an issue that is debated. In the description cited in the review, it is characterized as "propaganda." I would like to do more research, but based on this, I want some more context about this destructive microfiching that the author sheds tears about.
I will end with this: my deepest concern with this review is the way it parrots a book that is clearly polemical without a true engagement with the polemical tone. There is somewhat of a promise by the reviewer to engage with this at the beginning of the review. S/he doesn't succeed, though. Polemicists are not in the business of nuance, and this needs to be accounted for by any review of a book with such a tone.
Wait, we use acid-free paper now? I've got plenty of books I bought in my teenage years (the first decade of the 21st century) and they are noticeably more yellow than the more recent ones.
It varies from press to press. Overall the paper used now is better than it was 100 years ago and worse than it was 300 years ago. True acid free paper is more expensive, and you can’t count on it outside of academic books (which are intended to last a very long time) or fine press editions.
I recently bought an "academic" (?) book, and was quite disappointed :
- I bought it "new", and it indeed looks untouched, but after a mere 20 years after printing, the pages have already started yellowing.
- At that price and size (nearly 1000 pages) they should have used a hardcover !
A 2nd "new" book bought on Amazon for lack of another option ended up arriving not only quite used up but clearly taken (stolen ?!) from a library ! I'm going to have to get to the bottom of this...
Still waiting for a 3rd book, not sure why the seller needs several weeks before even sending it...
They probably don't actually have it and are trying to buy one from someone else.
Another very solid review! I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries including a few hours scrolling microfiche so I enjoyed the behind the scenes look.
New ranking:
1st Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)
2nd Double Fold
4th Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
5th Order Without Law
6th Why Buddhism is True
Out of curiosity, supposing that voting is done on an "approval voting" basis, where do you draw the line between "would vote approval"?
Honestly I'm hoping for a sort of ranked choice voting system. But if I had to draw a line then currently I'd put it between Are We Smart Enough... and Order Without Law.
This was fascinating, and the book review I have enjoyed the most so far. But it made me smile to think of film (I believe Kodak TechPan was developed for microfilming) being described as unreliable and fragile. I can't tell you how many digital photos I have lost through corruption, crashes and simple obsolescence of a file format! Yet I can scan or wet-print a negative or slide I took 50 years ago and have a perfect image.
Deaccessioning is hardly a problem unique to libraries. Museums have been embroiled in similar controversies, and people in the musem and library communities tend to take a very paternalistic tone on the matter.
They also tend to see their role as a pedagogical one aimed at the general public, with much less interest in preservation or appealing to specialists.
This review has produced a strange effect on me. I would ordinarily be sympathetic to the topic, I hate the destruction and disposal of items merely because they're old and out of the fashion, and the review broadly makes me agree that what is recounted as happening was indeed a tragedy.
And yet I disliked it. I think it's the tone - the reviewer seems to absolutely agree with Baker on all views. But I don't think that the librarians involved were uniquely and comprehensively all book-hating barbarians who only wanted an excuse to chop up and throw away old books, magazines and newspapers.
The reviewer says "How did Slow Fires get away with showing the dismemberment of rare items to the public? By pretending that nobody wants to be doing any of this." Well, how does the reviewer know they were pretending? I haven't seen this film, I have no idea if it was all performances and crocodile tears, but at least consider it possible that some of the people involved genuinely were regretful about the necessity (as they had been taught it was) to destroy the books in the process of recording them. Attributing ill-will and malice to *everyone* involved in the grand project is too much, I feel.
This is, after all, the lure of modernity. We are living in the Space Age! We have all this shiny tech! We want to prove we are modern and relevant! So here is the futuristic method of preserving and accessing material, why *wouldn't* we want to use it? Instead of multiple bulky copies of dusty papers taking up space, we can have modern clean microfilms that are easy (in theory) to store, share, and move. Besides, it's not like other places don't have copies of these, anyway, so what is the loss?
I challenge everyone here who ever threw out a newspaper: did you ever consider that in fifty years time a researcher might be dying to have an original copy of The Weekly World News or The National Enquirer? So we should be a little more sympathetic to people of the past.
Whether Baker or Cox are in the right, I can't say, but I can definitely see why Cox would want to fire off a rebuttal called "Vandals in the Stacks?" in response to the charge that all the librarians and archivists were no better than the Golden Horde descending on the Rus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%27
As to the ban on giving copies of discarded books to the public or even the shredded remains of the guillotined books, I wonder if it has something to do with the stripped books rule? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book I have definitely seen stripped books for resale in second hand book shops, even ones with "if this book has no cover, it cannot be offered for sale" type warnings included on the front pages. Also, there seems to be a tax rule about remaindered books and inventory that may affect the disposal of books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commissioner I do think libraries probably are covered by some kind of contract with publishers where they can't just give away old stock to the public.
I think I probably have some sympathies to the unfortunate guillotiners here, despite the grave error the entire project represented in destruction of original sources, because it's one of the perennial accusations against Christians by some subset of atheists: they destroyed all the books! as in this silly book (er, I may elsewhere have written something of a negative review about it) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age
So it is proposed that the wicked and obsessed Christians deliberately destroyed as much of pagan Classical learning as they could because they were just that big of meanies. See palimpsests, which get much play in this debate - scraped off the genius works of old in order to write over them with boring old sermons! But the real explanation tends to be more complicated https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/the-disappearance-of-ancient-books/
So therefore my sympathies are invoked on behalf of the misguided who thought they were preserving by destroying and I am less inclined to ascribe to every single one of them a sinister policy of book-hating and deliberate, knowing, destruction.
Well-done review, but made me hate the original (unread by me) book 😀
A small point: the church can’t be blamed for every book loss, but they can for some. When Calvin burned Michael Servetus at he stake for heresy, his followers also burned every copy of Cristianismi Restitutio they could find. Only three copies survive.
The early modern/Reformation-era church was more into censorship than the ancient church. The Index of Forbidden Books was first promulgated in 1559.
Censorship became more important after Gutenberg. When books are rare as hell, handwritten on scrolls, and most people are illiterate, then they aren’t much of a threat to those in power.
The books being trashed comes down to "almost no one is evil, almost everything is broken."
People really don't want the old books, despite the busybodies who will show up and be shocked that a library discards books. They don't want the books themselves, they insist someone *else* does, but they are almost never that someone else.
To avoid these busybodies and avoid exhausting emotion tirades, libraries just have to create a brick wall of "trash it all, no questions, do it where no one can see." And we probably do lose a few quality and valuable things here. The first step to fixing this is to start giving librarians more slack to let their judgment be trusted.
I don't think it's fair to say that anyone thinks librarians are "evil". The review never says that they were evil or book-hating, and I don't think Baker claims that either. It does talk a lot about laziness and starry-eyed techno-optimism, the same things you mention as well. "Pretending" in the quote above can also mean "pretending there is no other option" rather than "pretending that they don't enjoy destroying books for its own sake."
In the review, there are a few links to places where librarians discuss how and why they destroy books. None of them invoke the stripped-books rule or copyright, so I don't think this is an issue here (also, why would this apply to books 100+ years old, and to newspapers). What the librarians write is mostly that selling/donating books takes a lot of time and effort, and it's easier to throw them in the dumpster, so that's what they do.
Well, what do you mean by "evil" then ?
Sloth and Vanity/Pride are two of the 7 deadly sins for a reason...
Good point, but I would argue that a major component of being "evil" is consciously wanting to do harm to others. The dictionary definition might be unclear, but this is how I think most people understand the word. Someone who does bad things because they are (self-)deluded or lazy, but doesn't *want* the bad things to happen, isn't evil. Hence the saying just below, "almost nobody is evil, almost everything is broken."
This is a nice video showing how the Internet Archive digitizes books, with more info in the comments:
https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1358090982189719552
I found the review as interesting and well-written as everyone else here. Just wanted to make a small point about Brasilia. By the most inclusive definition of skyscraper (at least 100m), Brasilia has only one of them (the Central Bank) or two (depending on whether Congress is considered 100m or 96m). If we adopt the definition of 150m, there are no skyscrapers at all.
Residential buildings are all six stories or less. Legend has it that the architects wanted a height such that all parents could call their kids at the street for lunch from the window.
Curiously, very few structures are ever torn down in Brasilia.
The internet and scanners have existed for a quarter of a century now. Why isn't everything digitized and available for free on the internet yet?
Because digitizing things takes time and labor (= money). We have Google Books, archive.org, the Library of Congress digital collection, and many others. Hopefully more stuff will continue to be made available, but demanding *everything* comes off as greedy.
there are services that will digitize my books for $1 each, and meanwhile the government is handing out trillions in stimulus. Seems totally doable.
Where can you get a book digitized for $1? That doesn't add up. Just the physical act of scanning, say, 200 pages, should take longer than one dollar's worth of time at minimum wage, not counting overhead and other costs.
I agree that some of the vast sums of money that the government spends would be better given to libraries, but if your expectations are this unrealistic I expect you wouldn't be happy with the results of a larger library budget either.
https://1dollarscan.com/ cuts the binding and feeds the pages through a machine.
Non-destructive robotic scanning is probably coming soon.
This is $1 per 100 pages rounded up, not $1 per book, more than that for a higher quality scan such as you would need for archival preservation. Still, it looks remarkably cheap for what it is - the biggest cost is the destruction of the original, which is what would keep me from using it in most cases.
Copyright issues : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/#
Would have been nice if some of those hundreds of millions were spent on lobbying congress to redress the deficiencies in the laws that killed google books. Compulsory licensing and limiting copyright terms to 20 years.
Not to be too nitpicky, but I'd point out that the "Obama memoir is more historically interesting than a wal mart catalog" is exactly backwards. I've read catalogs from 1883, and they're fascinating glimpses into the real lives experience of the people.
Not just what they bought, but how they spoke, viewed themselves, how they idealized themselves. What they desires and what ailed them.
I can't say I've ever bothered to learn jack about uh...
*Googles*
Chester A. Arthur. Couldn't tell you a damn thing about him.
Obama seems important now, but in 2250? He'll be as notable as Chester A. Arthur. He'll probably get a footnote as the first black president, but otherwise?
People barely learn about Teddy Roosevelt anymore, and he was an astounding president.
I refer to you to 5 Sustainable Alternatives to Paper.
Going somewhat meta: I'm astounded at the number of librarians & archivists in the ACX readership.
Great review! In my opinion the reviewer's message is profound. We should protect our legacy in all the ways possible. Thank you for trying to show us "the bigger picture".
I'm late but I really enjoyed this one and want to compliment the author. Great choice of book and outstanding review! The Book Review contest seems to be a huge hit, at least I am enjoying this a lot.
call that Farenheit 451 lmao
Late to the game, but excellent excellent review. Struck the perfect balance between coverage of the book, its critics, and personal opinion. Damn well written too.