CHAPTER 11 — Thugs and Pansies
01. “Space is always a problem”: Irene Schubert, “Re: Serials microfilming,” PADG (Preservation Administrators Discussion Group), archived on the CoOL website (CoOL stands for Conservation OnLine), palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/10/msg00023.htm, October 31, 1997. Paula De Stefano, head of preservation at New York University, also contributed to this thread: she wrote that generally she stopped at the copyright cutoff date, then 1922. (That’s one reason so many older obscure things that libraries would otherwise have left alone were sliced open and expensively emulsioned — they’re in the public domain.) Then De Stefano wrote: “Of course, any titles already available on film are bought and the hard copy is tossed to make room on shelves. Space is a huge issue here.” PADG archives, CoOL website, October 31, 1997, palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/padg/1997/10/msg00022.htm. The current textbook of preservation microfilming says that it’s okay to throw out volumes that aren’t yet brittle, if you gain lots of space in doing so — hardly a preservational argument: “The institution may decide that filming long runs of serials, theses, or other coherent collections will so significantly ease space constraints that these items should be filmed as a unit even if some individual pieces are less suitable. For example, even if a few issues of a serial title were not acidic or not yet brittle, there would still be advantages in filming the entire run”—and getting rid of the paper. Lisa L. Fox, ed., Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists, 2d ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996), pp. 105–6.
02. Scotch-taping of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Esther Boyd-Alkalay and Lena Libman, “The Conservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Laboratories of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem,” Restaurator 18 (1997). The cellotaping, which caused “irreversible damage,” began in the late fifties in the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem; later, some of the tape was removed with trichloroethylene, and then the fragments were reinforced with lens tissue glued on with polyvinyl acetate or Perspex in solution. “As a result, the parchment glitters like glass and becomes rigid and fragile.”
03. “This cannot be emphasized”: Nancy E. Gwinn, ed., Preservation Microfilming: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists (Chicago: American Library Association, 1987), chap. 2, p. 36. Wesley Boomgaarden originally drafted this chapter, according to the preface.
04. “It must be stressed”: Gwinn, Preservation Microfilming, p. 37. The textbook asks: “With the enormous volume of paper-based materials that require reformatting to preserve primarily the intellectual content, can the institution justify microfilming as only an interim measure, and thus retain great quantities of printed materials after microfilming?”
05. book conservators generally report: See, for example, the organization chart published in Peter Sparks, “The Library of Congress Preservation Program,” in The Library Preservation Program: Models, Priorities, Possibilities, ed. Jan Merrill-Oldham and Merrily Smith, proceedings of a conference, April 29, 1983 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1985), p. 71.
06. “With few exceptions”: David H. Stam, “Finding Funds to Support Preservation,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1940 made a grant to the New York Public Library that “would supply funding to make a master negative from which the income to be derived from future sales would amortize the original investment”—helping libraries to help themselves. Bourke, “Scholarly Micropublishing.”
07. “a lot of material from the Jewish division”: Phone interview with Wesley Boomgaarden, April 21, 2000.
08. “When my hard-working”: Wesley Boomgaarden, “Preservation Microfilming: Elements and Interconnections,” in Preservation Microfilming: Planning and Production, papers from the RTSD Preservation Microfilming Institute, New Haven, April 21, 23, 1988 (Chicago: Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, 1989), p. 8.
09. “most of the filmed volumes”: Committee on Institutional Cooperation, “Coordinated Preservation Microfilming Project,” Annual Report 1995–1996, nova.cic.uiuc.edu/CIC/annrpt/ar95-96/cpmp4.htm (viewed September 25, 2000). This multiphase, NEH-funded enterprise was also called the Cooperative Preservation Microfilming Project.
CHAPTER 12 — Really Wicked Stuff
01. “licensing arrangements”: The phrase appears in the testimony of Peter Sparks before the Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, House of Representatives, Oversight Hearing on the Problem of “Brittle Books” in Our Nation’s Libraries, March 3, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1987), p. 105.
02. “Oh, the odor”: Scott Eidt, phone interview, April 25, 2000. Edward Frankland, the great nineteenth-century chemist who discovered diethyl zinc, wrote in his diary of his early experience with a related compound (dimethyl zinc) that when he exposed the new substance to air there was a “violent action” and a foot-long flame, followed by a “gas of a most insupportable odour.” Colin A. Russell, Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy, and Conspiracy in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 79.
03. Koski: Ahti A. Koski et al., “Studies of the Pyrolysis of Diethylzinc by the Toluene Carrier Method and of the Reaction of Ethyl Radicals with Toluene,” Canadian Journal of Chemistry 54 (1976).
04. “In the late fifties”: Richard D. Smith, whose Wei T’o process was slighted by the Library of Congress for years, published a thorough critique of diethyl zinc in Restaurator, in which he said that it had been tried as an ignition agent for Apollo-Saturn rocket, an assertion that some rocket scientists confirm. Smith’s excellent study is, however, prefaced by several paragraphs of hoo-ha about “the history of modern civilization deteriorat[ing] into dust.” “Deacidifying Library Collections: Myths and Realities,” Restaurator 8 (1987).
05. Ballistic-missile engineers: John J. Rusek, Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Purdue University, phone interview. See also John D. Clark’s entertaining Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 9, 13. Also George P. Sutton, Rocket Propulsion Elements: An Introduction to the Engineering of Rockets, 3d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1963), p. 252.
06. hypergolic: The term “hypergolic” was first used by German rocket scientists. Clark, Ignition, p. 14.
07. “high-energy aircraft and missile fuel”: Hawley’s Condensed Chemical Dictionary, 12th ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), p. 397.