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Here's Nicholson!

By Nicholson Baker
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2001, at 12:23 PM ET

Dear Jodi Kantor and James Fallows--

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Smoke me out of hiding! OK, I'm smoked. Here I am. I must apologize for my unresponsiveness in the face of all of your cheerful and splendidly brocaded commentary. It's a pleasure to be read so closely. I spent yesterday on a plane, drinking cranberry juice and looking down at the circular irrigation patterns in Midwestern farmland. Now it's 5:30 in the morning in a hotel in San Francisco, and the first radio interview isn't until 7:50 a.m. I'm going to spend all day today--the last event ends at 9 o'clock tonight--talking about things like shelving costs, microfilm, paper, Verner Clapp, electric guillotines, mummy linen, JSTOR, and so on. What a strange idea. And yet why not? People evidently care about research libraries and they want them to do right by what is on their shelves. When in the late 1980s some foundation types in Washington, notably the agitprop group called the Commission on Preservation and Access, began pushing the notion--which proved to be untrue--that millions of books were turning to dust, we responded, and Congress responded, with anguish and with money, not because we thought we would ever see or touch or use all those books, but because we felt that research libraries are communal assemblages of unknowables built by generations of intelligent librarians and that those librarianly decisions, fifty or a hundred years ago, as to what should become part of a great collection deserved respect--and because we understood that our ability to write history depends in a basic way on the keeping of the things, often obscure and even completely forgotten things, that people once published and read. It's not just historians who want research libraries to hold onto what they have--it's all kinds of people. We want libraries to do it so that we don't have to worry about whether our old copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the very last one. Which is your point, Jodi (if I may, and please call me Nick)--we expect libraries to hoard so that we don't have to. If libraries don't to it, nobody is going to.

And I like your point, Jim (again if I may) about the throwing out that goes along with moving--as true with individuals moving to a new house as it is about libraries moving to a new building. In fact, I like all your and Jodi's points--and all I can supply at this moment is some finer grain to the notion of "saving everything."

"We can't save everything." "We have limited money, and we have to make tough choices about what to save." Of course, these statements are true as far as they go--but they don't help very much unless we take a look at what "everything" is. Say the national library of a country at war stops adding to its collections, because the currency is in crisis and the borders are impassible and the librarians are defending the city or caring for the wounded. The library is, in one sense, saving nothing at all at that moment. The stacks are still, the cataloging department is empty. But of course if its shelves are not bombed, it is also, in another sense, saving everything. When peace returns, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief that the library was able to keep its collection. Right? The point being that there is a crucial distinction between what a library does to what is already on the shelf, put there by prescient predecessors, and what it does in adding to the collection from some point forward. A lot of my book is concerned with the decisions that research libraries have made about the things that are already on the shelf. And here I believe (and I'm talking not about little suburban public libraries that cycle their collections all the time, but big research libraries whose collections have become, in effect, public landmarks) that libraries do have a responsibility to keep what they have on the shelf. If (as the Library of Congress once had) they have a huge and beautiful late 19^th-and 20^th-century newspaper collection, they shouldn't attack it--sell it off, cut it up to microfilm it. It's part of their history, and our history, and even if they never buy another newspaper, it mustn't be destroyed.

It's true that I think it's quite strange that apparently no library currently keeps, for example, the New York Times in the paper form that people read it in every day. I do think that libraries around the country ought to be keeping the current newspaper output. It is no more unmanageable to do this now than it was in 1934 or 1948, when New York City had a number of enormous newspapers. If the standard form of newspapers changes, and most people read them as phosphors on a screen, or magnetic Buckeyballs in a semi-permeable substrate, or whatever ingenuities triumph, then libraries must move with the times and collect those dominant forms of dissemination. (The miracle--that printing presses around the country cover tons of pages every day with words and photographs and drawings and distribute them very early in the morning to people who rattle them around over breakfast or on the train and then throw them away--is not going to last forever, probably. But it's going on now, and we should enjoy it while it lasts!) But my wish that libraries were collecting current newspapers is separate from a strong belief that the really big-time research libraries--I'm talking about places like the Library of Congress and New York Public Library and Harvard and Yale--have the responsibility to keep what they already have. What I found so galling about the brittle paper movement was that it aimed at things that were old and in a real sense defenseless (and, incidentally, out of copyright) and pretended that they were doomed so as to be rid of them.

In another way, too, the idea of "everything" is very confusing and allows for the creation of some extremely puffy straw men. A hundred years ago, some of the great newspapers published a million copies a day. Of all those daily issues, 999,998 or so have disappeared--one, sometimes two, remain. This is an unbelievable state of rarity for something that whole cities bought and read every day. More people read the paper than anything else. So, I'm saying that libraries, if they have a run of one of those great papers, ought to keep it, period. Even if it is extremely fragile they should keep it, because (as we are finding now with digital cameras and printers) there will always be new ways of making copies, and we need to have things, whether fragile or strong, to make copies of. Here I'm saying that libraries should save--not "everything" printed--but one-millionth of everything. This is not an unreasonable request--I know it isn't unreasonable because even I, with no experience at administering anything more complicated than the toothpaste on my toothbrush, was able to rent space in a mill and ship over many tons of newspapers in order to store the last remaining runs of monuments like the Chicago Tribune. The Library of Congress squandered millions on wiggy programs like diethyl zinc deacidification and now outmoded 12-inch optical disk platters (that they thought would allow the library to "miniaturize" and replace its originals)--all that absurdly expensive activity was wasted, and storage buildings weren't bought or leased, and as a result we have a significantly diminished national collection. We have to learn from that recent example now, as we begin another fearsomely expensive phase of making digital pictures of the pages of books, and build into the copying process a prohibition on guillotining and a requirement for the safe storage of all source originals. In other words--we must keep what we have. Is that saving "everything" or not? I leave that to you to decide. Since we have it on the shelf now, we know it's physically possible to keep it. Nothing is inevitable. It's just a question of what we decide to do.

I must take a shower now. Thank you both very much for your thought-provocation--

Nick

P.S. Shelving cost figures: There's an endnote in Double Fold that has specific figures, but let me offer this. Last week I gave a talk at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of Duke University's storage warehouse. It cost $7.5 million to build, and it will hold about 2.5 million books. In other words, it cost them three dollars a book to build the building, and the overhead will run below 20 cents per year per book. Compare that to the cost of digital scanning or microfilming, which costs in the area of $100 a book, plus $1 a year to store the roll of "master" microfilm in a vault, or some unknown amount per year to keep alive the digital record, as machines and the code that runs them undergo their periodic convulsions of redesign. (Now even Zip disks look as if their days are passing!) Duke's warehouse is not the way to store all books--because they store them in arbitrary order on 30-foot-high shelves you reach on a cherry picker. But even storing books in the traditional way, in call-number order, on 15-foot-high shelves, would cost only about $6 a book--say, to be safe, $10 a book. Making copies is expensive (which is not to say we shouldn't do it), storage is cheap. If we set things up so that we tithe 10 percent into a paper conservancy fund as we digitize to provide for the keeping of the originals when we're done--we'll be just fine. In fact, at the beginning of a scanned or OCR'd or microfilmed document, it might be nice to read: "No Originals Were Harmed in the Making of This Copy."