Nicholson Baker, in a 24 July 2000 article in the New Yorker, "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past" (pp.42-61), criticized librarians for destroying newspapers and depending on unreadable microfilm copies. Baker is convinced that the lack of space -- not paper deterioration -- is the rationale for microfilming. Systematic microfilming and destroying of the original papers, according to Baker, has resulted in the loss of both usable and valuable materials. The following talking points to help you respond to questions about the Baker article have been prepared by the ARL Preservation Committee and ARL staff.
Also attached is a copy of the Letter to the Editor that the Library of Congress sent to the New Yorker in response to the Baker article.
In late July, ARL directors were sent copies of the joint American Historical Association, ARL, and Modern Language Association publication "Preserving Research Collections: A Collaboration between Librarians and Scholars" that might also be helpful in responding to Baker's arguments.
Baker does a somewhat biased job of cataloging the history of libraries' use of microfilming. He focuses on the problems with microfilm, a new technology adopted by libraries in the 1930's in an effort to solve a critical paper deterioration problem. Librarians share Baker's concern about the poor-quality of early microfilm and his anguish when it is difficult to use. The article, however, does not acknowledge the successes libraries have had with microfilm, especially since the early 1980s when standards and best practices for preservation microfilming were developed. These standards have been adopted by libraries around the world and are required by the NEH for institutions participating in the U.S. Newspaper Program and the Brittle Books program. Microfilm that is properly produced and used in libraries with top-quality reader-printers can be a practical, cost-effective access and preservation strategy. It can allow libraries to make far more materials available to more users -- both local and remote -- than would be otherwise possible. It can reduce the labor of research significantly. Zoom lenses can make print legible that is extremely hard to read even in the original. In this information-glutted world, supplying the most content to the most people in the most cost-effective manner is not an easy task.
Collectors are often at odds with libraries because their motivations are somewhat different. Collectors acquire and preserve collections -- and remove them from wide use. Libraries have the job of promoting, broadening, and expanding use of collections and making sure they're accessible. The nation does not financially support unused repositories with either private or public funds. So libraries are faced with trade-offs that rarely affect the collector.
Baker ignored several decades worth of scientific research, confirmed by paper industry experts, on the longevity of paper that the Library of Congress shared with him. Acidic newsprint may survive when bound for several decades, but not in usable condition. In addition to the acidic nature of paper itself, environmental conditions, such as heat and humidity, and the care with which the materials are handled by staff and users, will affect how rapidly paper deteriorates.
Given the instability of newsprint as evidenced by crumbling pages and research studies, librarians made the only reasonable choice they had at the time -- to preserve newspaper content through microfilming. (Mass deacidification has only recently become stable and is not effective on already embrittled paper.) The newspapers in the British Library cited by Baker were likely in good condition as a result of minimal use.
Approximately 60.5 million newspaper pages have been microfilmed through the collaborative U.S. Newspaper Program -- millions of pages that would have otherwise crumbled unusable into dust in attics, historical societies, and libraries.
For every scholar who has problems with microfilm, there is another who blesses it. While none of us are truly satisfied with the medium, it has proved bountiful in many, many cases. For example, Barbara Tuchman, in her essay "The Houses of Research," relates the experience of stumbling upon a set of microfilm of the Sentinel at the NYPL when working on her biography of General Joseph Warren Stilwell. The Sentinel was the weekly journal of the 15th Infantry stationed in Tientsin, to which Stilwell was attached in 1926-9. After finding nothing on the first reel, she "was ready to send the box back, but decided as a matter of conscience to look at the second reel. There on the first page of the first issue was an article by Major Stilwell, the regiment's recognized expert on Chinese affairs, inaugurating a series, no less, on the personalities and issues of the civil war! His articles continued to appear each week in the Sentinel for more than a year, providing me with my protagonist's own judgment of events at a climatic time in which he shared." Tuchman described her find as "an unexpected strike of the kind that brings the occasional rare thrill in research." She also noted that "a Library staff member had made a hobby of regimental histories and had acquired a file of the Sentinel, which the NYPL, with an admirable sense of time, place, and history, had preserved. Researchers in every field," she went on, "must owe the staff many debts similar to mine." [In Practicing History: Selected Essays by Barbara W. Tuchman (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. 76-79.]
Baker issues a valuable call to libraries to apply their collaborative skills to focus on print publications as artifacts. Technology, and in particular the ability to digitize and easily share copies of print publications that display, albeit in two dimensions, all the characteristics of the originals, including color, has changed the landscape for libraries. Libraries may be able to rationalize their collections -- and grapple with ongoing space problems -- by reducing the amount of duplication in holdings required to serve a large local constituency or to share collections nationally. This makes it possible to consider ways of ensuring that the last copies of the most important publications do not disappear that would have been impossible heretofore.
Research libraries take their obligations to preserve the scholarly record for posterity very seriously. They also take seriously the mission of trying to support the American democratic values of education and intellectual progress through mutual support, collaborative action, and making collections as widely available as possible to those who can't afford to travel and spend lengthy sojourns in repositories. Recognizing that no single institution can save everything, and beset by continual financial pressures, libraries are constantly searching for solutions to mitigate the natural tension between preservation and access. They have been willing to adapt and apply promising technologies, such as microfilm, to help them in this task. This means occasionally taking risks and learning from mistakes.