Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

A talk sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources at the University of London

"Do We Want to Keep our Newspapers?" Conference, March 12- 13, 2001

I am pleased that the issues raised by Nicholson Baker about the preservation of newspapers have captured international attention. Preservation of the artifact is a topic that deserves thoughtful consideration by scholars, librarians, funding agencies, publishers, and the general public. Getting this topic to the forefront of discussion through publications and conferences can only help us move forward as we tackle complex issues relating to preservation, stewardship of the cultural record, and resource allocation.

Today, I hope to focus on the future and on the ways in which we might develop systematic methods for selecting and saving those newspaper titles that we feel are essential to scholarship and that have particular artifactual significance. I agree that we often have not done a very good job in the past, thus suffering the loss of some critical titles. I also agree that some microfilming was done poorly. Whether we are talking about the preservation of the original or the creation of a surrogate, we simply must do better.

I am delighted to represent the librarian's perspective, and I fantasized briefly about trying to persuade you that we all speak with a single voice. In fact, of course, there is no single viewpoint on important and complex issues. This diversity of opinion is especially true in a time of rapid change and where scarce resources are at stake. What I would like to do today is to talk a little about fact and fiction, and to suggest some ways in which we might find a better balance between preservation of and access to scholarly materials.

It amuses me to see librarians cast in the role of villains who are pulling off a vast conspiracy on the general public and the scholarly community. It is a refreshing change from the dreary stereotyping that we usually endure. While one hears of the occasional villainous or light-fingered librarian, they are hardly the norm. In fact, librarians are usually assiduous and diligent collectors. Almost all the librarians I have encountered in the last twenty-five years want to collect as much as possible and keep as much as possible in the original format. Most of my colleagues fight voraciously for ever larger budgets so that we can collect as widely as possible in support of current scholars and in anticipation of future scholars. More has generally been better, and the original almost always preferable to a reprint or reformatted surrogate.

But we are in a transitional period. For most of the twentieth century, librarians were concerned more with acquisition than with preservation. The period after World War II and especially after Sputnik, was a time of major growth for American universities. Our libraries had increasing acquisitions budgets and new buildings to house our rapidly expanding collections.

But several things changed and forced us to rein in our spending and to reevaluate our collecting. Namely: preservation concerns and degradation of purchasing power. It was increasingly apparent that we were building collections that were silently self-destructing. The acidic paper of the nineteenth century was becoming brittle and unusable. This was true of books, but even more so of newspapers, which were generally printed on poor paper and often stored in disadvantageous circumstances. Increasingly, our attention was drawn to the potential loss of content and to the lifetime cost of owning a title. We could no longer blithely select a title and think only of the original investment. We now had to think about the annual cost to house the titles and to preserve it for future generations. The relatively modest initial acquisition cost ballooned when these factors were taken into consideration.

At about the same time, library budgets began to stall or decline. We were no longer looking at ever increasing acquisition budgets and construction of new buildings. We were beginning to talk about off-site storage and other options. Given the costs of stabilizing decaying newsprint and the competition for space, microfilm was a reasonable option. What we failed to address adequately was an appreciation for the experience of the artifact and the assurance of high quality microfilm.

In American libraries, bibliographers typically rely heavily on current scholars and academic programs to drive their collecting. While we also collect for the needs of future scholars, we are consistently informed by the past and present. There is ample evidence that historians did then, and do now, make regular use of microfilm. While no one is enamored of microfilm, its accessibility was often praised by faculty. Most faculty and graduate students had neither the time nor the money to travel to remote locations to use original newspapers. And faculty routinely gave the purchase of microfilm sets Ð often newspapers and collections of primary documents Ð their highest priority for purchase. All those factors sent the strong message that microfilm was in fact an acceptable surrogate for the original. And as space grew tighter and as the condition of original newspapers grew worse, microfilm surrogates seemed an increasingly acceptable option. Even today, many scholars tell us they prefer the ease and accessibility of microfilms to the use of the artifact. In a recent U.S. survey conducted by NINCH (National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage), most academic respondents reported regular use of surrogates and a few reported that they never, or only rarely, used original material. An historian from UCLA tells me that newspaper surrogates have been essential to his work. He says that he "could not have written as well or as expeditiously without microfilms.

So scholars by their practice and their purchase recommendations have told us that surrogates are often acceptable. In weighing access against original artifact, access often wins out.

But where the artifact is important, we have major logistical challenges that have not been adequately addressed. Whose responsibility is it to decide what gets saved in original form and who pays the significant costs of doing so?

I do not think it is a national library's responsibility to save a full run of every newspaper. The job is simply too large and too expensive. Nor do I believe that every newspaper is worth preserving. What I envision instead is a coordinated effort to put in place a distributed mechanism for selecting and preserving the artifact. Different libraries, almost certainly academic libraries or public libraries with a research or local history mission, should collaboratively preserve selected newspapers of their region. I also don't think that all newspapers are worth saving in original form in their entirety. While exemplars should be saved in their entirety, others might be reformatted in microfilm (at exceptionally high quality standards) and sample issues or partial runs could be saved in paper to let future scholars know what the artifact looked like at various points in time.

I mentioned earlier that this discussion is timely. In fact, the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in Washington, D.C. has convened an international Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections, of which I am a member. The Task Force is charged with outlining the major issues relating to artifacts and making recommendations. Perhaps its most important role is to promote discussion among scholars, librarians, funding agencies, and others on what we should be preserving in artifactual form and how we can find the resources to do it. The Task Force is concerned with all artifacts typically found in today's libraries: print and manuscript, audiovisual, and digital. It is worth noting, that while the preservation of newspapers is an important issue, it is one that pales in comparison to the production volume of films and broadcast media -- television and radio -- and the higher costs to preserve those media. While newspapers may be among the most important media in the nineteenth century, surely in the twentieth century radio, television and motion pictures have eclipsed newspapers in volume of production and in cost to preserve. Perhaps the solutions we are able to work out for newspapers will be relevant to these other important and costly media, for they too are subjects of scholarly attention and part of the cultural record.

The essential part of any preservation effort has to involve serious collaboration among scholars and librarians. While neither group can speak with authority on what scholars of the future will need, we can make educated guesses about what is likely to be important and we can make collective decisions on how best to allocate scarce resources. Those resources include space as well as funds. The CLIR Task Force is holding hearings at various universities in the U.S. to begin that dialogue, and it is the intention of the members that the report will spark some serious conversations throughout the international scholarly community. Abby Smith of CLIR tells me she would welcome offers to host focus groups on the artifact within the U.K.

But let me get back to possible future scenarios. I mentioned that I don't think national libraries should be mandated to collect all or even most newspapers in their countries. It is a huge financial burden and would occupy massive amounts of space. The major issues are reliable funding and adequate and accessible space. National libraries often do not have generous and consistently stable budgets. They are subject to political squabbles and real or engineered budget crises. With such fiscal uncertainty, how can they reliably acquire and preserve their national output of newspapers, or even a major portion of it?

Second, the national libraries tend to be located on expensive real estate. It is prohibitively expensive to store newspapers in such space. Yet, offsite storage presents a host of different problems. Can scholars easily travel to a remote location? Or, if physical volumes are transported to the users, delays and damage to the originals will surely result.

Rather than rely solely on our national libraries, I believe we should be exploring ways to distribute the responsibility for the maintenance of both surrogate and artifactual copies. In the U.S. the structure for surrogates already exists through the National Newspaper Project. Libraries could identify and retain those titles in their region that have important artifactual value. At the University of Virginia, for example, we already retain in hardcopy the local daily newspaper and our student newspaper. We do not think it is our responsibility, however, to preserve the Washington Post in hardcopy. For a large urban area, several libraries might even share the responsibility for both the investment and space.

Even a model of distributed responsibility faces a number of serious obstacles. The first is the determination of what is important to save. We do not have the resources to save every single newspaper in its original form. There are parallels to architectural preservation, where it is routinely accepted that not all buildings are worth saving. Likewise, some newspapers are not worth saving. They will have little or no value to scholars. The challenge will be to get scholars and librarians together to make those tough choices.

The second major obstacle is the distributed responsibility. In the U.S. librarians have talked for decades about cooperative collection development, but it has not been a wildly successful endeavor. In the early days, it was difficult because we did not have easy mechanisms to make the availability of collections readily known. But advances in technology soon solved that problem. Even then, true cooperation was rare. Two stumbling blocks were the inability to give up collecting locally and the unwillingness to take on financial obligations for which there was no demonstrated local need. Those are still important obstacles. In the case of newspapers, we are unlikely to see multiple libraries vying for the privilege to maintain the hardcopy of a newspaper. But we are quite likely to find a library balking at retaining hardcopy at some expense and space allocation when in fact there is no local need, and may be a local preference for microfilm. Also in the history of collection development, we have had instances where agreements were broken when budgets got tight or local politics became heated. If we are to solve the newspaper dilemma, we must find solutions and commitments that are reliably long-term. On the bright side, there are certain things in our favor. First, greater awareness of the importance of the artifact may produce some "good citizen" behavior. Second, budget stringencies have forced the interdependence of libraries and have resulted in the blossoming of new consortia. More libraries are accustomed to acting collaboratively in order to leverage purchasing power and other investments. As libraries begin to be perceived as nodes in a much larger system rather than stand-alone entities, the collaborative responsibilities may be taken more seriously.

But perhaps there are other models as well? Some have suggested that publishers ought to bear the responsibility for maintaining hard copies, but librarians do not have confidence in this notion. Commercial publishers tend to be concerned with current revenue streams rather than future scholarly use of their publications. Even if a publisher were to take a less revenue-based approach and act in the interests of the public good, what happens when publication ceases? Are there other agencies that could take on this responsibility or at least provide funding support? An interesting model in the U.S. for films is cited in the CLIR Task Force Study. In 1990, the Library of Congress convened a meeting about a very specific issue -- the colorization of black-and-white films. The group, however, soon focussed on the much bigger issue of film preservation. As the CLIR draft states: "An unforeseen consequence of this meeting was that all the players Ð archives and libraries, studios, artists, and distributors, each with competing interests Ð were forced to identify their common interest in the integrity of film heritage and to collaborate for the first time toward a common preservation goal." (http://www.clir.org/activities/details/task.html) Studios have taken on as their responsibility the preservation of studio films, while the national government is responsible for documentary and "orphan" films. Unlike newspapers, however, the studio films are seen as assets that can still generate revenue.

As a librarian, I hear often from scholars about their optimistic expectations for new technology. Many are hoping that digitization will solve the problems of microform, making surrogates even more readily accessible. Microform reader/printers are difficult to use and they usually necessitate a visit to the library at a time when many scholars increasingly expect to access content anyplace-anytime. Some of the early efforts to digitize newspapers worry me because they repeat the mistakes of the past. Some are digitizing from inferior microforms, some are doing shoddy original work. One American company is buying up newspaper rights and digitizing at very low quality, according to the digital experts on my staff. If we have not learned anything from our microfilming mistakes, we will waste enormous amounts of money and serve scholars poorly. The digitizing must be done well to be useful, and we must be able to ensure the preservation of electronic formats that may be even more ephemeral than newsprint.

In summary, I agree with Mr. Baker that in our zeal to tackle preservation and space problems we often have given short shrift to the experience of the newspaper artifact. And many newspaper microfilming projects did not have adequate quality control. As we look to the future, we need Ð in collaboration with scholars -- to carefully assess which newspapers must be preserved in original form. It will be difficult and errors are inevitable, but it must be done. As we struggle with scarce resources, there are inevitable trade-offs. Some things will be saved. Some will not. Many scholars may lament the loss, but I find solace in a remark by an historian at the University of Virginia who said "there is far too much being saved for twentieth-century history." Scholars cannot possibly study all the material available even on a relatively discrete research topic.

As the CLIR Task Force on the Artifact suggests, there is a sense of urgency about tackling issues relating to the preservation of artifacts and moving expeditiously to decisions. Resources are finite, but the flood of new non-print formats to be preserved seems infinite. The newspaper population is miniscule compared to the universe of audiovisual and digital materials that threaten to consume our attention and our budgets.

Perhaps the newspaper question gives us a discrete problem to solve. And if we are successful, the lessons learned may help guide us in making decisions about the much larger universe of artifacts needing preservation or reformatting for use by future generations.

Karin Wittenborg
University Librarian
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
USA