50. “DEZ is produced”: Welsh, “In Defense of DEZ.”
51. “DEZ is and always will be”: Koski added, “The cylinder that DEZ is stored in is labelled as pyrophoric but these cylinders are not perpetually in flame either, although [their contents] certainly would be if the valve was cracked open.”
52. $2.8 million: U.S. Congress, Book Preservation Technologies, p. 18.
53. “I think the safety questions”: Boyce Rensenberger, “Acid Test: Stalling Self-Destruction in the Stacks,” The Washington Post, August 29, 1988, p. A13, final edition, microfilm.
54. “were so startling”: Robert J. Milevski, “Mass Deacidification: Effects of Treatment on Library Materials Deacidified by the DEZ and MG-3 Processes,” in The 1992 Book and Paper Group Annual, vol. 11 (Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Conservation, 1992). Milevski became the preservation librarian at Princeton in 1992.
55. one-hundred-million-dollar twenty-year contracts: Rensenberger, “Acid Test.”
56. thirty thousand books a week: Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Oversight Hearing, p. 111.
57. “And if you know Billington”: Billington’s occasional outbursts are described in Linton Weeks, “In a Stack of Troubles: The Librarian of Congress Has Raised Funds. And His Voice. And a Lot of Eyebrows,” The Washington Post, December 27, 1995, p. F1, Nexis. “In August 1995, Billington learned that the U.S. attorney had written him a letter expressing concern about the way book damage was being reported. Someone on the library staff had answered the letter. ‘Unsatisfactorily, and in my name,’ says Billington. ‘He went hysteric,’ says one library official who asked not to be named. Billington remembers that he threw something. He says it may have been a book.”
58. Alphamat: Nielsen Bainbridge, Alphamat Artcare, www.nielsen-bainbridge.com/bainbridge/html/sparks_testimonial.htm (viewed September 20, 2000).
59. “strategic information reserve”: Testimony of James Billington, April 19, 1994, before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities. Billington disseminated several variations of this speech.
60. “substituting technology for paper”: James Billington, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, June 15, 1992, excerpted in Commission on Preservation and Access, Newsletter, September 1992. In 1999, Billington told Congress that one of the library’s “key current overriding initiatives” is “providing massive digital access to information and, at the same time, streamlining and re-engineering our handling of access to books and other traditional containers of knowledge.” Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 106th Cong., 1st sess., 1999, p. 120.
61. Bhabha Atomic Research Center: See the capsule biography accompanying Chandru Shahani and William K. Wilson, “Preservation of Libraries and Archives,” American Scientist, May — June 1987. Bhabha scientists began work on India’s nuclear bomb in 1971, according to Nicholas Berry of the Center for Defense Information (e-mail to author). See also Center for Defense Information, “Building the Indian Bomb,” May 19, 1998, www.cdi.org/issues/testing/inbombfct.htm (viewed August 14, 2000).
62. “pathetically poor engineering”: Kenneth E. Harris and Chandru J. Shahani, Mass Deacidification: An Initiative to Refine the Diethyl Zinc Process, Library of Congress Preservation Directorate (October 1994), lcweb.loc.gov/preserv/deacid/proceval.htm.
63. If in fifty years: Jana Kolar notes that “while most treated papers degrade less rapidly, some results of accelerated ageing experiments show an increased degradation of papers whose pH has been changed from the acidic to the alkaline region using deacidification treatment.” Accelerated-aging experiments can, however, supply only directional hints. Jana Kolar, “Mechanism of Autoxidative Degradation of Cellulose,” Restaurator 18 (1997).
CHAPTER 14 — Bursting at the Seams
1. costs were bundled: Between 1984 and 1994, the Library of Congress spent $5.7 million of the $11.5 million congressional appropriation for the construction of a diethyl-zinc facility, according to General Accounting Office, Financial Statement Audit for the Library of Congress for Fiscal Year 1995. Although they are difficult to document, the overhead costs attributable to diethyl-zinc research and development must be added to that amount.
2. Landover: Library of Congress, Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:22 (May 28, 1976).
3. long-frozen Everyman’s Library edition: F. L. Hudson and C. J. Edwards, “Some Direct Observations on the Aging of Paper,” Paper Technology 7 (1966); cited in Richard Smith, “Paper Impermanence as a Consequence of pH and Storage Conditions,” Library Quarterly 39:2 (April 1969): 183.
4. Cold War librarians: See Library of Congress, “Welsh Named Deputy Librarian,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 35:4 (January 23, 1976).
5. “warehouses of little-used material”: William J. Welsh, “Libraries and Librarians: Opportunities and Challenges,” paper presented at the seventh international seminar, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Library Center, Kanazawa, Japan, 1989, in Research Libraries — Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. William J. Welsh (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).
6. “vastly more than the microfilming”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”
7. “Disk storage is attractive”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”
8. “the extremely high resolution”: Welsh, “Library of Congress.”
9. “reproduce items with sufficient quality”: Carl Fleischhauer, “Research Access and Use: The Key Facet of the Nonprint Optical Disk Experiment,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 42:37 (September 12, 1983). Also quoted in Biggar, “Must the Library of Congress Destroy Books.”
10. reduce the three Library of Congress buildings: The article describes the data-retrieval jukebox that is “humming away” in the basement of the Madison building: “Deputy librarian W.J. Welsh says the jukebox, part of a three-year, $2.1 million pilot program, is the face of the bibliographical future — one that could shrink the library’s entire 80 million item collection into one of the library’s three existing building[s].” Ken Ringle, “Card Catalogue to Be Filed Away; Library Turns to Computers,” The Washington Post, November 13, 1984, p. A1, final edition. See also Ellen Z. Hahn, “The Library of Congress Optical Disk Pilot Program: A Report on the Print Project Activities,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 42:44 (October 31, 1983), which gives space and “compaction” as one of the justifications of the optical-disk program. Hahn writes that “miniaturization in some form” is essential because “the likelihood of building another Library building on Capitol Hill is at best remote.” The scanning will be destructive: “In most cases, the print material, that is, periodicals, will be guillotined and then scanned automatically at a rate of one page every two seconds.” One of the benefits of the optical-disk program, according to a later article, is “the elimination of the not-on-shelf or ‘N.O.S.’ problem”: if you destroy the item in order to scan it, it is no longer part of the collection, and therefore won’t be missing when you look for it. Library of Congress, “Library Announces Public Opening of Access to Optical Disk Technology,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 45:7 (February 17, 1986).