3. Lesk: Michael Lesk, Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1997). Lemberg’s dissertation gets a paragraph on pp. 76–77.
4. “very high performance Backbone Network Service”: E.g., a 1999 National Science Foundation grant of $422,000 to Harvard for a “High-Performance Internet Connection” connecting Harvard to NYNEX and the NSF’s vBNS, in order to support scientific projects and “Digital Library Applications.” Of course Harvard should have high-speed Internet connections, if it needs them, but the federal government shouldn’t be paying for them, and the money shouldn’t come bundled in a plan to destroy traditional libraries.
5. routinely prepare for digitization: At a 1998 conference sponsored by the Research Libraries Group and Great Britain’s National Preservation Office, John E. McIntyre, head of preservation of the National Library of Scotland, discussed the results of an informal survey of digitization practices in a paper called “Protecting the Physical Form.” He wrote: “Returns from the Preparation Group’s questionnaire suggest that disbinding in order to scan a volume is common, in most cases so that a flat bed scanner can be used.” John E. McIntyre, “Protecting the Physical Form,” in Guidelines for Digital Imaging, Joint RLG and NPO Preservation Conference, 1998, www.rlg.org/preserv/joint/mcintyre.htm.
6. “knowing that the original will be disbound”: Carla Montori, “Re: electronic/paper format & weeding,” PADG (Preservation Administrators Discussion Group), December 15, 1997, archived on the CoOL (Conservation OnLine) website, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/12/msg00011.htm (viewed September 29, 2000).
7. Making of America: Michigan’s Making of America books are to be found at moa.umdl.umich.edu.
8. “It is substantially cheaper”: Michael Lesk, “Substituting Images for Books: The Economics for Libraries,” Document Analysis and Information Retrieval (symposium), Las Vegas, April 1996, www.lesk.com/mlesk/unlv/unlv.htm (viewed September 19, 2000).
9. “avaricious in [their] consumption”: William G. Bowen, “JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Communication,” the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, October 4, 1995, www.mellon.org/jsesc.htm. JSTOR’s webpage background document states that the “basic idea” behind Bowen’s JSTOR “was to convert the back issues of paper journals into electronic formats that would allow savings in space (and in capital costs associated with that space) while simultaneously improving access to the journal content.” JSTOR, Background, www.umich.edu./~jstor/about/background.htm (1996) (viewed September 15, 2000). A recent JSTOR brochure entitled “Electronic Archives of Core Mathematics Journals” says: “By making the complete runs of important journal backfiles available and searchable over the World Wide Web, JSTOR not only provides new research possibilities, it also helps librarians reduce longterm costs associated with storing these materials.”
10. survey conducted by JSTOR: JSTOR, Bound Volume Survey, April 3, 2000, www.jstor.org/about/bvs.htm (viewed September 19, 2000).
11. “modem life”: “The third class of tendencies is easily identifiable with those impulses to disinterested benevolence which are so prominent in modern [OCR’d as modem] life.” Henry Rutgers Marshall, “Emotions versus Pleasure-Pain,” Mind, n.s. 4:14. (April 1895): 180–94. I also got multiple hits for “modemist” and “modemism,” none having to do with data-communications.
CHAPTER 8 — A Chance to Begin Again
1. “application of the camera”: Raney, “Introduction,” in Microphotography for Libraries, p. v.
2. “a couple of curious librarians”: M. Llewellyn Raney, “A Capital Truancy,” The Journal of Documentary Reproduction 3:2 (June 1940). Possibly Keyes Metcalf was there, and the scout was probably from the Rockefeller Foundation; Charles Z. Case of Recordak helped out with the cost analysis.
3. “Every research library would”: Fremont Rider (writing anonymously), “Microtext in the Management of Book Collections: A Symposium,” College and Research Libraries, July 1953, reprinted in Veaner, Studies in Micropublishing, p. 206. Rider presented this proposal anonymously here, but in other settings he repeated it almost word for word under his own name.
4. James T. Babb: In the 1952–1953 annual report of the Yale University library, Babb announced that “our shelves are weighted down with many books and periodicals that we easily could do without.” In the past, he said, Yale was “ambitious to be a library of record; that is, have one copy of every book of any importance.” This was “a highly questionable ambition,” Babb believed; and it was time to undo what his forebears had done. He proposed, and the Yale Corporation approved, a “drastic” plan to “1. Decatalogue and discard material which is considered to have no further scholarly value,” and “2. Purchase or reproduce with our own equipment, in microtext form other books and periodicals, the original then being discarded.” James T. Babb, Report, 1952–1953, quoted in John H. Ottemiller, “The Selective Book Retirement Program at Yale,” Yale University Library Gazette 34:2 (October 1959).
5. “Roses, jasmine”: Fremont Rider, And Master of None: An Autobiography in the Third Person (Middletown, Conn.: Godfrey Memorial Library, 1955), p. 46.
6. “converted to psychism”: Fremont Rider, Are the Dead Alive? (New York: B. W. Dodge, 1909). Theodore Dreiser supplied the book’s title; David Belasco based a play on it called “The Return of Peter Grimm.”
7. “They are thoroughly disgusted”: Fremont Rider (writing as Alfred Wayland), Are Our Banks Betraying Us (New York: Anvil Press, 1932), quoted in Rider, And Master of None, p. 98.
8. “astonishing flood”: Rider, And Master of None, p. 99.
9. “You are right!”: Roosevelt’s letter (typewritten except for the last two sentences) reads: “Dear Mr. Rider: Thank you ever so much for your very nice letter and the pamphlet which you sent me. I have been much interested in reading it. You are right! Keep it up— Very sincerely yours, Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The letter is dated “At Warm Springs, Georgia, May 6, 1932.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Fremont Rider, Fremont Rider papers, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. (Suzy Taraba, Wesleyan’s university archivist and head of special collections, located it and sent me a copy.) Roosevelt gave his nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention on July 2, 1932: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
10. He began a system: Rider, And Master of None, p. 152: “Wholesale methods of disposition do not bring the highest possible prices; but they enabled Wesleyan to dispose of its discards at very small handling cost”; after buying fifty thousand volumes and selling off thirty thousand, Rider was pleased to discover that “the additions to the Library actually cost it nothing.”