conference report update

[calimac]

I've received a couple of comments on my Fahrenheit 2451 conference report, referring to my paper on image reproduction access in libraries, mentioning the alleged practice of libraries to discard paper originals of newspapers after microfilming them.

I addressed this in the paper, but I didn't want to respond to these in comments, because it's a complicated matter, so here instead is what I said in the paper.

For a period when microfilms were new*, libraries thought they might actually replace fragile originals. But that quickly proved to be mistaken. Nicholson Baker, a gadfly essayist and novelist, claimed in a book published in the year 2001** that the British Library was still discarding original printed newspapers after microfilming them, but every fellow librarian I talked to at the time – and that book got a lot of discussion in libraries – found this claim puzzling. I’d been taught in library school that discarding originals was a bad old idea that was not being done any more, and I was taught that 20 years before Baker wrote his book. So what happened? Had the British Library reverted to bad practice? Had they never got the message in the first place? Or were the discards merely unneeded duplicates? I don’t know. The fact that Baker, on purchasing some of these discarded bound volumes, had no trouble finding a university library willing to take them in shows that the discarding of originals was far from the widespread mania his book depicts it as. But all of Baker’s writings on libraries are so sophomoric – an inextricable combination of wise and foolish – that I can’t take the time to discuss him any further.

*Microfilm was introduced in the 1920s, but the period I'm thinking of, I was told, extended to the 1950s.
**The book was titled Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Comments

[oursin]

I can't speak for the BL (I thought it was actually the Library of Congress or the NYPL he was woezing on about) but certainly originals were withdrawn from circulation once microfilmed (Oh my Colindale long ago and the wonky film readers). But newsprint, as I am sure I do not have to inform you, is a total conservation nightmare of acidic woodpulp paper (along with quite a lot of later C19th books in BL) that was never meant to last and is gradually decaying. One could see this in action when the unfilmed volumes were produced and gently shed particles all over the desk.

I am also not at all confident of what the condition of old newspapers would have been after microfilming, having had some gruesome experiences when we did not have inhouse services and had to outsource some of our archival microfilming.

[radiantfracture]

But all of Baker’s writings on libraries are so sophomoric – an inextricable combination of wise and foolish – that I can’t take the time to discuss him any further.

I enjoy this.