Clapp responded to these unwelcome results by having the Council commission a similar study, completed in 1961. The Crerar Library6868 in Chicago, a privately endowed reference library whose social sciences collection had been sold off by Clapp’s former Library of Congress colleague Herman Henkle, was supporting itself by marketing its services to places like the Atomic Energy Commission, whose Nuclear Science Abstracts Crerar’s librarians produced. The library was moving6969 from an old building to a squat glass box on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology; there were many pre-1920s journals in the collection which took up space. Clapp and Henkle felt, or hoped, that microfilming these volumes might be cheaper than continuing to store them, but they couldn’t be sure, especially with Pritsker’s discouraging results; so Clapp asked a small consulting firm to perform an operations-research analysis on the problem, “Costs and Material Handling7070 Problems in Miniaturizing 100,000 Volumes of Bound Periodicals.” Clapp, too, allowed his engineers to assume “shearing of spines” in their estimates, since spine-shearing allows for “considerable labor saving7171 in the photographic operation by avoiding the necessity for raising and lowering the pressure plate each time a page is turned.”
This time around, the cost comparisons came out a little better. It now appeared, according to Clapp’s summary of the research, that with enough buyers of prints of the microfilm, a large microfilming project could successfully reduce a library’s storage costs without any of the sacrifices that Pritsker and Sadler enumerated — no sacrifices, that is, “except that of destruction7272 of the text.”
CHAPTER 10. The Preservation Microfilming Office
The newspapers went first, but as the filmable remainder of their own bound backfiles dwindled, library planners began to look around for other ways to occupy their now fully staffed and equipped information-renewal programs. “It’s like having a sausage factory, in a way,” one former Library of Congress department head told me. “You’ve got to feed the beast.” (The library owned twenty-four microfilm cameras1 in 1973; they were shooting seven thousand feet of negative film per day.) Books with brittle paper were one good possibility — shabby, unattractively aging, toned by time. In the mid-sixties, the library, again in the vanguard, began segregating thousands of books that were (as the 1968 annual report of the Council on Library Resources phrased it) “otherwise beyond redemption.”2 Coincidentally, the library needed more space: “Space was a key word3 in the thinking and activities of this division [the Office of Collections Maintenance and Preservation] during fiscal 1966,” reported the Library of Congress Information Bulletin. In 1967, Verner Clapp’s last year as president, the Council gave the Library of Congress (via the Association of Research Libraries) a grant for a Pilot Preservation Project, to explore “arrangements for assuring the preservation4 of these [brittle] books for the continuing uses of the research community.”
One interesting idea, which had been propounded by Gordon Williams in a 1962 study (also prepared with the help of a grant from the Council), was to save a physical copy of every significant book in a central, low-temperature storage warehouse, where it would be available for microfilming on demand. A benefit of the plan, according to Williams, was that libraries would then know what they could “safely discard”5 if they wanted to, since there was one backup in deep freeze. This well-intentioned conceit proved in the end administratively unwieldy, but the research done in connection with it, which compared some of the Library of Congress’s books with the same titles held in other libraries, showed that the condition of a given book “varied greatly”6 from library to library: an important observation, since it implied that book longevity depends on local variables (humidity and temperature, rough treatment, styles of rebinding) as much as it does on the innate chemical properties — the “inherent vice”—of the paper.
Then it came time to relocate all those brittle books to high-density, low-cost housing. (In a later era, some stack areas in the Library of Congress’s Jefferson building were reportedly known as “the slums.”7) The library hired Frazer G. Poole8 as preservation officer; Poole had a degree in aerological engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy (aerology, in Navy parlance, is the study of flying weather; the usage dates back to dirigibles) and eight years of experience directing the Library Technology Project of the American Library Association, where, at Clapp’s suggestion9 and with Clapp’s money, Poole developed performance standards for commercial bookbinding — which may be the reason that the Library of Congress did so much indiscriminate rebinding10 in those days. In 1968, Poole created a Preservation Office, whence blossomed the Preservation Microfilming Office (PMO), which filmed ninety-three million pages (three hundred thousand non-newspaper volumes11) betweeen 1968 and 1984. In the eighties, the PMO had a staff of nineteen; they were transfiguring two hundred thousand guillotined pages per week. All of this material was pronounced “embrittled to the extent12 that it was no longer serviceable.” We’ll never know what “no longer serviceable” means, because the vast majority of those books are gone. One of the PMO’s managers explained the eventual disposition of these three hundred thousand items:
The volumes are cut,
13
filmed by the Photoduplication Services, and the negative and positive copies are edited. All volumes, except those unique titles to be retained after filming, are sent to the Exchange and Gift Division. If the material is not claimed by interested institutions, it is pulped.
We are, wrote Deputy Librarian of Congress William Welsh in 1985, “running our cameras against the clock14 in the race to save as much as possible.”
How many institutions, as a practical matter, are going to claim books that have been cut out of their bindings? Individual citizens might want mutilated books, but they weren’t allowed to have them, according to Joanna Biggar,15 who wrote a 1984 article for The Washington Post Magazine, “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books to Save Them?” The article, by identifying a few of those three hundred thousand volumes referred to by the head of the PMO, makes clear what did and what didn’t qualify as a “unique title” in the Library’s thinking in that era.