So all conservation is preservation, but not all preservation is conservation. And here’s a troubling organizational fact: book conservators generally report05 to directors of preservation departments. This is true even though a book conservator’s training is a slow apprenticeship, over many years, while the preservation administrator needs but an extra year of library-science courses to earn the right to decide, or help decide, what to do with a stackful of artifacts about which he or she might know almost nothing.
Complicating matters further, the manager of the library’s reformatting lab (the microfilm and/or digital lab) also usually reports to the director of preservation. Thus the top person, the preservation administrator, or P.A. — who more often than not (although there are exceptions) has had no bench training and has only a slender acquaintance with the manual repair of books — has jurisdiction over two labs whose aims are in opposition to each other. The conservation lab wants to save the book; the preservation lab wants to “save” the book. The conservation lab costs money and progresses deliberately, item by item, sewing, gluing, restoring (although small fixes take only a matter of minutes) — and all of its work must go back on the shelf. The microfilming and digitization labs seem fast, because the planetary camera’s white über-flash and the scanner’s green underglide occur hundreds of times an hour, as on a production line, and though these departments have high overheads, they also make money, sometimes packets of it, through federal grants, state grants, foundation grants, and the selling of copies — and not everything that gets imaged has to go back on the shelf. (The New York Public Library had agreements with “various commercial publishers and micropublishers,” according to former director David H. Stam: “With few exceptions,06 the income and royalties from these publications have been put back into the library’s preservation programs.”)
So the P.A. presides over one department that pays at least part of its way with outside money and one that doesn’t; one that helps the library with its storage problem and one that doesn’t. If you were a P.A. — a real cost-sphinctering conehead (not all are, of course) — with the managers of those two departments beneath you, of whom would you feel fonder? When you moved up to a senior post, whom would you promote to your old job: the chief of the microfilm lab, who steadily pulled in money, or the chief conservator, who seemed only to be able to spend it? More than a few former spine-whacking micro-managers are now preservation administrators.
In the early eighties, Wesley Boomgaarden briefly ran the preservation-microfilming operation at the New York Public Library, where his crew filmed more than two million pages, or ten thousand book and journal volumes, per year (“a lot of material from the Jewish division,”07 Boomgaarden recalls, “a lot of material from Slavonic”); now he is the preservation officer at Ohio State. In 1988, writing in the pages of an anthology called Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, Boomgaarden nicely captured the tension that existed between preservers and conservators:
When my hard-working
08
preservation microfilming staff wheeled truck after truck of brittle volumes into the conservation laboratory each week — to use their “low tech” power cutter in the process of cutting off spines to make filming easier, faster, cheaper, and better — they were villified [
sic
] by the conservation shop staff and called “thugs” who were destroying books in order to save them. And, because of the accusers’ pitiful statistics in conserving those minute numbers of dainty things — we “thugs” in turn labeled our conservation studio colleagues as “pansies.”
“That was a long time ago,” Boomgaarden now says. “We’ve learned so much since then.” In a recent big preservation project that Boomgaarden led, “most of the filmed volumes09 [were] retained in the collections.” About five to ten percent of what is currently microfilmed at Ohio State is, by Boomgaarden’s estimate, thrown out — an improvement, at least. One crucial difference between then and now is that Ohio State has an enormous new remote book-storage facility; its space crisis has abated.
CHAPTER 12. Really Wicked Stuff
I was very glad to meet the talented people in the Library of Congress’s conservation lab, to be sure, but since I was trying to learn more about past and present microfilming practices, I was disappointed that Preservation Reformatting was not on the tour, too, as previously requested. I did get a chance, however, to have a talk with the library’s chief scientist, Chandru Shahani, a friendly man in a gray suit. On one side of the table, Dr. Shahani and I sat discussing things like the fold test for paper strength and the predictive value of accelerated-aging experiments; on the other side sat Diane Kresh and Helen Dalrymple. Kresh was Shahani’s boss; Dalrymple was a formidable woman from the library’s Public Affairs Office whose job, as far as I can tell, was to obstruct inquiry. The two women monitored the interview, saying nothing, taking a note from time to time.
But this didn’t seem to cramp Shahani’s style, and presently we came to the subject of mass deacidification — another consuming interest at the Library of Congress over the past three decades. Before 1850 or so, papermakers passed their freshly made webs of paper through tubs of animal gelatin, which added the necessary ink-resisting layer to the page. But the gelatin smelled bad, and, more important, its application was a separate, costly step. Then they learned that they could pour some new liquids and powders into the pulp vat, before the material was squeeze-dried into paper, that would leave it with ink-fixing properties similar to those of gelatin sizing. They mixed in rosin, distilled (as is turpentine) from pine sap, and aluminum sulphate (alum), which helped the rosin migrate to the outside surface of the newly formed paper and stay there. This technique was called “vat sizing” or “engine sizing,” because it happened right up front in the rag engine. The alum-rosin additive worked very well, but rosin contains abeitic acid, and alum creates sulphuric acid; and those various acidities, through branching sequences of chemical reactions (with air, with water, with lignin, with bleaches, with starches, clays, and other additives) — reactions that nobody, not even Dr. Shahani, understands very well — weaken the fibrous mat of civilization-sustaining cellulose.