At Dalton’s “School for Scanning” seminars (also brought to you by the Mellon Foundation and the NEH), librarians go to hear current thinking on embedded metadata, SGML tagging, lossless compression, TIFF formats, emulation, refreshment, and disbinding. Why disbinding? “To get a digital image that’s really well captured, it’s still best to disbind,” Dalton advised us.
CHAPTER 32. A Figure We Did Not Collect
How high, one wonders, was the national toll? How much destruction did we as a nation pay for? The National Endowment for the Humanities doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know. I asked George Farr whether the NEH ever kept track of the number of volumes that physically went back on the shelves after their contents entered the Paradiso of spools (though I didn’t put it that way), and whether the NEH required its grant recipients to provide any counts or percentages of physical books discarded or disbound as part of their project reports. “We have not done so”1 was Farr’s written reply. “NEH has never taken a position on the eventual disposition of brittle volumes that have been microfilmed to preserve their intellectual content. We believe that this is a decision that is more appropriate for the grantee libraries to make.”
The most confidently flourished post-microfilm discard percentage that I have come across was offered by Carla Montori, head of preservation at the University of Michigan, in a posting to the Preservation Administrators Discussion Group. Montori writes:
Analysis of 15 years
2
of disposition decisions [at Michigan] indicates that something less than 40 % of brittle originals are withdrawn after reformatting into or replacement by a stable format copy.
Michigan has a long-established microfilming program, begun by Verner Clapp’s close friend Frederick Wagman. Perhaps, I thought, this forty-percent figure would make a good conservative estimate?
I ran it by Ellen McCrady, editor of the Abbey Newsletter. She said she had no way of knowing, since libraries weren’t eager to make that sort of information public, but that it seemed on the low side. “I would guess that forty percent were saved whole,” she said. She told me to check the Association of Research Libraries’ annual preservation statistics, which might offer some clues. So I ordered a copy of the latest year then available, 1996–1997.
You can learn all kinds of things from this staple-bound purple booklet.3 Harvard got $1.3 million in outside preservation money (a good chunk of it from the NEH); Boston Public Library got $3,522. Michigan digitized 1,350 “bound volumes” (they were no longer bound by the time they were digitized), and microfilmed 5,547. You can check how many volumes were deacidified, filmed, scanned, commercially bound, boxed, and treated to three different intensities of physical repair at each of over a hundred really big U.S. and Canadian libraries. Since 1988, according to these figures, which for technical reasons under-report actual levels, libraries microfilmed about one million volumes, most of the work paid for by the federal government. But you will not find in this purple book of preservation statistics — perhaps because the Association of Research Libraries is too tactful to demand it of its members — how many volumes were in fact preserved, in the old-fashioned sense.
I asked Julia Blixrud, one of the people who compiled the numbers, whether there had ever been an attempt to track how many books survived reformatting. She said she didn’t think so. Was that possibly, I said, because it would be embarrassing to poll members for such a statistic? “That I don’t know, I’ve not been a preservation librarian,” Blixrud said. “I would guess that it was not as much of interest to us.” And she added, “The political nature of this survey has been to assist in some ways in getting funds to continue to do the preservation microfilming.” She told me to talk to Jutta Reed-Scott, who with Harvard’s Jan Merrill-Oldham designed the survey in the late eighties.
“That unfortunately is a figure we did not collect,” said Reed-Scott. “I am not aware that anyone collected that. It would be a really difficult figure to keep track of. There are so many variables that go into returning items to the shelf.” (Oh, piffle. It would be no more difficult to track this figure than to track any other.) I asked Reed-Scott if the need for such a number had ever come up during the planning stage. “I do not recall that that ever arose as a question,” she said. I told her that my sense from talking to people was that there had been a sudden drop-off in preservational disbinds and discards around 1993. (The year, incidentally, of Thomas Tanselle’s book-burning piece.) “I think that’s exactly what happened,” Reed-Scott said. Now the problem was scanning. “That is the arena where the issue will become much more difficult than the preservation-microfilming arena,” she said. “You can film from a bound volume, with some difficulty, but it is certainly possible. It becomes far more difficult to scan from a bound volume, because obviously you get the distortion, if the margin is narrow.” In the evolution of scanning theory and praxis, we’re about where we were in 1953 in microfilm.
There is a further fact to note about Jutta Reed-Scott. In the seventies, she was not a preservationist at all; she was a hard-core space freer-upper. In 1976, as Jutta Reed, then collections development librarian at MIT, she published a wonderfully cut-and-dried paper for Microform Review arguing that if you subscribed to the microfilm of the journal Daedalus, for example, and dumped all but current paper issues, you would save $1.35 per year in binding costs. Add to that the “dramatic reduction4 of storage costs of micropublications over hard copy periodicals,” as determined by the formulas5
storage cost = ½av(t(t+1))
and
storage cost = ½bv(t(t+1))
(where a is the yearly cost of storing one bound volume, and b is the yearly cost of storing one volume copied onto microfilm; where t is the storage time in years, and v is the number of volumes per year), and you really begin to save, save, save. Assuming an annual storage cost of $0.38 per journal volume and $0.034 for microfilm, our soi-disant preservationist calculates that if you replaced bound volumes of Scientific American with microcopies, you would over a twenty-year period save over $1456 in storage costs. (Of course, you will no longer be able to interpret Scientific American’s color-keyed illustrations properly, and over that same period you’ll have paid University Microfilms a fortune for the microfilm subscription.) “In the long run microforms will increase the storage capacity of present library buildings and can postpone the construction of additional storage space,” Jutta Reed unwaveringly writes.
Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, then, that Reed-Scott exhibited an indifference, a listless lack of curiosity, as to how many original volumes were saved after they were microfilmed, since in an earlier life she believed in the “decisive economic advantage” of the dump-and-replace method without any consideration of embrittlement whatsoever.