The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, requires federal agencies to disclose to the public, and to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, any plans that would affect districts, sites, buildings, or “objects” that are on the National Register of Historic Sites or that meet the register’s criteria for inclusion. One of the criteria is that the building or object has “yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history.” No better description of a library collection could be had, and yet nobody as far as I know has tried to apply this law to the Library of Congress’s collection (although the library’s Jefferson building is on the National Register); no other law sets limits on what the library can or can’t do to, say, its surviving newspapers, or to its decks of books and periodicals. If the library’s management wanted to reduce their original holdings by one third over the next several years, they could do so without holding a single public hearing; and the library has not in the past felt any obligation to alert the public to what they are planning to micro-mutilate or to sell off. It is a strangely secretive place, underscrutinized by comparison with other federal bureaucracies, its maladministration undetected by virtue of its reputation as an ark of culture. The library has gone astray partly because we trusted the librarians so completely.
I asked Diane Kresh, head of the Preservation Directorate, whether there were any decisions that, with benefit of hindsight, she wished had gone differently. Any pieces of the collection that she would have liked to have seen retained that weren’t?
“As far as I’m aware, everything we’ve acquired we’ve retained, at least in my tenure here,” Kresh answered. What about serials, I asked — bound newspapers and journals and magazines? She said that the library had maintained the newspapers — they were just maintained on film. I don’t doubt Kresh’s sincere belief in the equivalence of microcopies and originals, but if a cop was told that some missing diamonds were still on display in the museum, they were just “maintained” as cubic zirconiums, the cop might arrive at a slightly different interpretation of the event. “I feel even with the newspaper example I’m comfortable with the decision,” Kresh told me. “And as for other collections, I’m not aware of any that we’ve gotten rid of.”
Kresh could so easily have said, “Yes, there were hundreds of thousands of books that we had that we should not have pulped after we filmed them. Their destruction was totally unnecessary and motivated in large part by a need for space.” And she could have added, “As a matter of fact, there is currently a dire space crunch in both the Jefferson and Madison buildings — we’ve got stuff piled on the floors, it’s a mess — and we’re getting rid of things right now that we would probably keep if we were willing to rent another warehouse to tide us over until our remote-storage facility in Fort Meade is finished.” Of course, Kresh is loyal to her employer and wouldn’t say anything like that; I shouldn’t have expected her to. But it would be true.
CHAPTER 11. Thugs and Pansies
The chief of the Preservation Reformatting Division of the Library of Congress, Irene Schubert, contributed to an electronic discussion group a few years ago. In a case where some of a periodical’s run is brittle and some is not, Schubert wrote, the library would consider tossing it all out anyway: “Space is always a problem01 it seems, so we may get some encouragement to microfilm the entire run and discard the paper copies.”
I asked, ahead of time, to interview Irene Schubert as part of an appointed visit to the Library of Congress’s Madison building one afternoon. Diane Kresh told me that Schubert was unavailable. “If you have any issues,” she said, “you can give them to me.”
Kresh did, however, take me on a complete circuit of the library’s renowned conservation lab, which I hadn’t asked to see but was of course very glad to admire nonetheless. (“I wanted to start the tour by saying that we have the premier lab in the world,” said Kresh flatly.) The full-bearded senior rare-book conservator, Thomas Albro, was working on an elegant box for a fifteenth-century edition of Ptolemy’s Geography that he had just finished restoring. He had disbound the book, which was “inoperable” as a result of a bad rebinding in the nineteenth century—“shoddy work,” he said — and he had washed the paper to remove yellowed sizing (sizing is the layer of gelatin that papermakers used to keep inks from soaking in and spreading, or “feathering”), and he had beautifully rebound this treasure in pale leather. Elsewhere, I saw very old Japanese softcover books for which a staff member was making lovely cases with bone fasteners. One conservator was worrying about what to do about some yellowed Wite-Out on one of Bill Mauldin’s original drawings. Mauldin, a political cartoonist, published some of his work in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. The Library of Congress once had a run of Stars and Stripes; it has microfilm now. Nonetheless, Mauldin’s art is getting the most exquisite restoration treatment imaginable.
At another worktable lay parts of an enormous Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther: a conservator had gone over its surface with a tiny vacuum cleaner and painted over each of its letters with gelatin parchment size. In the Collection Care Section, the purpose of which is to deal non-violently with books from the library’s general collections, I admired the recently acquired pneumatic box-making machine, which stamps out custom-fitted boxes to hold books that in an earlier era would have gone under the lens, or to a commercial bindery to be reclothed in radiant pyroxylin (plastic-coated cloth). (The Library of Congress had a zealous rebinding policy for many decades — they sent books to the bindery rather than make minor repairs in-house, and thousands of ornate bindings were lost in consequence.)
All of this was genuinely impressive, and it helped to remind me of the befuddling divergence, in library language, between conservation and preservation. The two are no longer synonyms — in fact, they are more often antonymic, although library spokespersons have been known to rely on the lay confusion that surrounds their undisclosed redefinition. Conservation refers to the repair or restoration of the original object, the book or manuscript, the empirical, thumbable thing; preservation, on the other hand, though it may embrace the act of conservation, has more generally come to mean, in response to powerful euphemistic requirements, any act that carries on or propagates, in any chosen medium (e.g., the original pages, photocopies, fiche, film, tape cartridge, Microcard, diskette, CD-ROM, Norsam metal disk, and so on), the words or images of the original object. Thus preservation can mean dumping or other more remunerative forms of dispersal, whereas conservation never does, although of course conservational practices have at times caused unintentional harm. (The Scotch-taping of the Dead Sea Scrolls02 comes to mind.) Reversibility — the potential to undo what you or your predecessors have done — is a watchword of modern book conservation; book preservation, by contrast, is often irreversible, because the book is gone. “This cannot be emphasized03 too strongly — the filming process is often damaging and irreversible,” according to the primary textbook of the eighties, Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists. Often intentionally damaging and irreversible, one wants to add — for on the next page the textbook says: “It must be stressed04 that if you do remove bindings from bound volumes before filming, the quality of the film is usually improved, and the cost of producing the film is significantly reduced.”