In the first few years, the wave of soft money went mostly to libraries with existing photoduplication programs — Columbia, NYPL, Harvard, Yale, Chicago — but that changed as more universities created preservation departments of their own, hiring full-time preservation administrators to run them. The preservation administrator could perform a local deterioration survey that would produce some shocking percentages, choose an enticing subset of the collection to present to the NEH in a grant proposal, negotiate contracts with nonprofit or commercial microfilming shops, and convince the subject specialists in charge of that piece of the collection to come up with five or ten thousand brittle books. The institutionalization of the preservationist’s profession was one of Patricia Battin’s cherished dreams — indeed, just before she left Columbia, she had secured for its library school nearly half a million dollars from the NEH to train more fresh, green P.A.s. “We didn’t have a manufacturing infrastructure,” Battin explained to me. “I mean, how are we going to film all this stuff?”
There is a direct correlation between the spread of preservation administration as a career and the widening toll on old books. Battin wrote in 1988 that the “number of preservation operations11 in American research libraries has increased from about 5 in 1978 to more than 50 in 1988, as universities have acted to institutionalize the activities necessary for the preservation of scholarly collections printed on acid paper.” She adds: “And we haven’t yet begun to fight!”
There are about eighty preservation administrators at work now. The only major research library in the country that still has no full-time or part-time preservation administrator is the Boston Public Library. It is also the only large library in the country that has kept all of its post-1870 bound newspaper collection.
CHAPTER 28. Microfix
Not all preservation administrators approved of what the Commission on Preservation and Access was up to, though. “I just saw Pat as leading the whole profession down a tube,” says Randy Silverman, the director of preservation at the University of Utah’s library. Utah has a dry climate, and Silverman, a practicing bookbinder and conservator, knew that there wasn’t a brittle-paper crisis in his library. In fact, he wasn’t running into many brittle books at all, and in the ones he did see “gutter-snap,” as he called it, was often the problem: the pages broke at the perforations of an oversewn binding. He and Matthew Nickerson,1 a graduate student, replicated the standard double-fold survey procedures on a random sample of books from the university’s collections and found, as they expected, brittleness rates at about two percent — their point being that storing books at lower humidity was possibly a better (and far cheaper) way of extending their lives than cutting them up to take pictures of them.
Silverman’s main objection to Battin’s NEH-funded program, however, was that in the first several years there was no money for book repair. “The profession was steered by this great fear,” he told me, and the fear led to mass microfilming, which “took the focus away from other activities. My hobbyhorse is trying to repair books — you know, fix them — and there was no money left for conservation. All the money was going to film. And every time you got done filming, you were able, in some people’s minds, to simply throw the books away.” There were plenty of things, Silverman knew, that an experienced book-repair person could do for a population of damaged or fragile books2 to keep them on the shelf and available for use — and the repairs wouldn’t cost nearly as much as would microfilming them or giving them high-end conservation treatment. Detached pages, flapping spines, a broken text-block — many troubles were fixable if you knew what you were doing. But most preservation administrators were trained as reformatters and managers and not as practitioners of a traditional craft; having no personal experience doing repair, they sent things to the microfilmers that would have required only a little thread, some paste and Japanese paper, and some close attention.
Early on, Silverman began writing a polemic against the Commission and its selling of “microfix” (his word) as the sole solution, but he buried it. “It was really loaded ten years ago. I would shoot off my mouth in private. It was too dangerous to say stuff, because in fact you couldn’t change it.” Some of his colleagues had private misgivings,3 as well; but, as Silverman wrote me after we talked, “the reality was nobody could stand up to Ms. Battin because they all had their hand in the NEH till that she was stockpiling.”
Once, however, Silverman challenged Battin publicly. It happened at an American Library Association convention, circa 1991; Battin was giving an update on the national microfilming campaign. “She made it clear that people really needed to participate in the brittle book program by writing grant proposals,” Silverman says. There was a lot of money that year for microfilming, and it was in danger of not being spent: “If it wasn’t used she feared that Congress would determine that the brittle-book crisis (as she had promoted it to them) would appear not to require funding and once the critical momentum was gone she feared it would never be reestablished.” Silverman spoke up during the question-and-answer period. “I tried to make a point that the exclusive focus on microfilming equaling ‘preservation’ was leaving the repair of the physical collections unaddressed. She told me that book repair was a local maintenance issue and did not qualify for national funding because it was each library’s responsibility to maintain its own collection.”
Battin wrote authoritatively in 1990: “The issue of repair as an alternative to microfilm was not considered as a federal responsibility in the initial legislation.” Later, apparently in response to protests from some grantees, the NEH changed the rules somewhat; George Farr was at pains to point out several times to me that the NEH has “provided support” for the repair and reboxing of more than fifty thousand books (out of more than eight hundred thousand that were filmed), but when I repeated Farr’s claim to one preservation manager, this manager (who asked for anonymity) said, “Whoa, whoa, first, the assertion is wrong. He hasn’t paid for fifty thousand books. He has allowed us to pay for the repair of books as part of our cost share. Do you know how these grants work? We write a grant to NEH, NEH gives us two dollars, and we have to add in a dollar of our own. It’s two to one. The NEH guidelines allow us to repair books that have gone through the process, as part of our contribution. In the ultimate bottom line, which is the total of what we’ve contributed, [along] with what NEH provides, he’s technically correct. But there is no money in the federal budget to support the repair of collections.”
CHAPTER 29. Slash and Burn
Patricia Battin gave me a brittle book when we met one afternoon in Washington, at the offices of the Council on Library and Information Resources on Massachusetts Avenue. The book is a play by Robert de Flers1 and Francis de Croisset, in French, accompanied by a memoir and a frontispiece photograph of de Flers in profile (he’s reading a sheet of manuscript) and a facsimile of his handwriting. It is a charming little book, published in Paris in 1929 and library-bound in pink, black, and red marbled boards soon thereafter (since it originally came out in paperback), and now tied with a soft, salmon-colored shoestring. The bookplate says “Columbia University in the City of New York” in Gothic letters, and bears the seal of the university, in which Wisdom, or some nobly enthroned woman, says something in Hebrew while holding up a book to three naked children. There is a scriptural reference at the feet of the children, citing a passage in Peter: “Laying aside all malice2 and guile and as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby.”