As intimated in our editomial remnarks last month, the gm-eat suibtermanean convumision imi, Java gmoxvs mom-c appalling as time facts relating to it become better kumouvum, antI time meal magnitude of time tlisturbance can be mucasumably compiehended.
“It xviii be unnecessamy,” the writer continues, “for us to enter into further details of time catastrophic, save to remark that all we mepouted of time changes in time configumation of time hind lmadi time suiruounding ocemun bottom, has beemi comifimmed, amid much mom-c extensive changes noticed.” An explanatory note about viewing the plain text derived from Making of America page-images says that “OCR accuracy is high12 but varies from page-to-page depending on a number of variables”; the note blames the errors on the “brittle, faded, and foxed” originals, saying that proofreading “would be very expensive and time consuming.” A production note preceding the OCR text says that Cornell did the work in order “to preserve the informational content13 of the deteriorated original.” The “best available copy” of the original was used, of course. The originals were disbound, we learn elsewhere, “due to the brittle nature14 of many of the items.” I asked Anne Kenney how the library determined brittleness; she said they used the double-fold test. “I’m not as wedded to retaining, at each site, the original sources as some may be,” she said.
It’s extremely kind of Cornell’s librarians to put these images on the Web, and one can’t blame them for the untutoredness of their OCR software (which despite its sometimes garbled output unquestionably helps researchers in their truffle hunting15), but it’s truly a shame, after the decades of havoc wrought by microfilming, that pages bearing such a wealth of engravings are once again needlessly dying to feed the sausage factory. The faculty and students of Cornell were not asked whether they wanted valuable runs of nineteenth-century magazines sacrificed for this experiment. “These things were never aired out in a public forum,” says Joel Silbey, a Cornell historian who served on an advisory board to the library. “I was stunned when I first heard that they would have to disembowel the things.” He began to “express consternation.” The response of Anne Kenney and her colleagues was, according to Silbey, that “this was the only way it could be done and that it had to be done or we would lose things.” Which is a curious rationale, since the intellectual content of The Manufacturer and Builder, along with many other Making of America titles, was already backed up on microfilm when Cornell began their work — the emergency last-ditch “rescue” of this supposedly at-risk title had already happened. After some discussion, several of the disbound runs were sent to Rare Books, where they are or will be boxed. It was too late for The Manufacturer and Builder, though.
So the machine-induced loss begins all over again. But it can be stopped: there is no reason why one medium must mandatorily stab another one in the back. John Warnock, head of Adobe Software and a book collector of catholic tastes and deep pockets, discovered that he could create extremely fine-grained, full-color electronic copies of his own antiquarian books, using an overhead camera with a four-by-five-inch digital camera-back, without doing anything to them more injurious than turning their pages. He founded Octavo Corporation, which has published searchable facsimiles of early editions of Robert Hooke, William Harvey, Franklin, Galileo, Newton, and Copernicus; Octavo recently finished photographing one of the Folger Library’s First Folio editions of Shakespeare. It takes several minutes for the array of sensors in the camera to process the detail in one double-page spread, each of which consumes one hundred and forty megabytes of storage; the resulting scans have a serene luminosity and depth of detail. I described to Warnock the Cornell project of digitizing and throwing away rare nineteenth-century math books and replacing them with black-and-white printouts at six hundred dots per inch. “I have no sympathy with that, I’m afraid,” Warnock said.
At some point, maybe not so long from now, a company such as Octavo may want to scan a volume of newspapers, at high resolution, nondestructively, as if it were a fragile sixteenth-century folio. The president of the company will make inquiries at a library or historical society in his city. He will be led into a room that holds four hundred gray cabinets of microfilm. “But we need the originals,” the company president will say. “Where are the originals?”
CHAPTER 36. Honest Disagreement
On September 29, 1999, President Clinton gave Patricia Battin a National Medal for the Humanities. “Patricia Battin is saving history,” Clinton said at the ceremony. “The high acidic content of paper threatens to destroy millions of old books, but she has led the national campaign to raise awareness about this challenge and preserve the genius of the past.” Clinton described Battin’s efforts to “transfer information from so-called ‘brittle books’ to microfilm and optical disks.” More than 770,000 books have “already been preserved,” Clinton said. He ended: “Thank you for saving the knowledge of the past for the children of tomorrow.”
Since Battin began campaigning for the cause in 1987, the National Endowment for the Humanities has given away more than $115 million to libraries for microfilming — seventy-some million dollars for books in addition to the forty-five million assigned to the participants in the U.S. Newspaper Program. “I think the NEH newspaper program is incredible,” Battin said to me. “We have access to resources that we would never have if they had been left alone. I think we will have the same with the Brittle Books Program.” The reason that the newspapers were thrown away after they were filmed, Battin explained to me, was that “they were crumbling during the process — I mean, they were breaking and everything during the process of filming them.”
No. Even if things did instantly crumble after their final farewell wave of photographic transubstantiation — and they don’t — that would explain only the discarding of those newspapers that were actually filmed, and not the practically universal dumpage of the same runs at other libraries. I suggested to her that microfilm also saves space.
“But I don’t think that saving space was the issue,” Battin remarkably replied. “Not ever in my experience. I would say we all went into microfilming with great reluctance.”
When Battin was head of Columbia’s libraries, one of her senior colleagues was Pamela Darling. Darling was a cheerfully unrepentant thrower-outer. “Think about space costs,”1 she argued in Microform Review: if a library was to replace half of its volumes with microfilm, “existing shelf space would last almost twice as long.” Darling advised readers of Library Journal to “keep re-examining2 your librarian’s hoarding instinct.” If you don’t really want something enough to pay for its repair, then