12. whose page “breaks off”: Preservation Department, Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, Preservation Department Manual, www.indiana.edu/~libpres/Manual/prsmanual2.htm, last revised March 16, 2000.
13. “four corner test”: Mono Acquisitions and Rapid Cataloging (MARC), MARC Procedures: Brittle Books, Northwestern University, www.library.nwu.edu/marc/procedures/brittle.htm, last revised March 10, 1999.
14. “when a lower corner”: “Brittle Books Replacement Processing,” Memorandum 95-1, Ohio State University Libraries Preservation Office, www.lib.ohio-state.edu/OSU_profile/preweb/memo951.htm, July 1995. Brittle books under this definition “are not able to be rebound or routinely repaired.”
15. “very gentle tug”: Preservation Department, University of Maryland Libraries, Brittle Materials and Reformatting Unit, www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/TSD/PRES/checkrelated.htm, last revised July 28, 1999.
16. “in jeopardy when anyone”: Paul Koda, “The Condition of the University of Maryland Libraries’ Collections,” Technical Services Division, University of Maryland Libraries, www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/TSD/PRES/surtext.htm, last revised March 5, 1999.
17. Columbia University: In 1987, Columbia’s method was as follows: “To TEST FOR PAPER STRENGTH fold the lower corner of page 50 back-and-forth three times. (For volumes less than 100 pages long, fold corner of page located about 1/3 of the way from title page.) If the paper withstands folding and a slight tug it is strong and can be sent for commercial treatment. If paper folds 2 or 3 times but then falls off it is borderline brittle and must be sent to the Conservation Lab for treatment. If the paper breaks easily it is brittle and can only be replaced, filmed, photocopied or boxed.” Columbia University Libraries, Preservation Department, The Preservation of Library Materials: A CUL Handbook, 4th ed., March 1987, p. 2.
18. “A book is considered”: “Definition of Brittleness,” Reprographics Unit, Preservation Department, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, web.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/repro/brittle/britdef.htm, last revised December 3, 1996.
19. “planned deterioration”: “Planned Deterioration: Guidelines for Withdrawal,” Reprographics Unit, University of Florida, web.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/repro/brittle/autowd_pd.htm, 1998.
20. If and when: George A. Smathers Libraries, Preservation Bulletin 7.6, August 11, 1992, web.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/manual/CMManual7-6.htm, part of A Manual for Collection Managers. This particular Florida document defines an item as brittle if it fails to survive a “double fold test measure less than six.” Though the chapter is dated 1992, the Manual is listed as “Updated 5/17/99.”
21. “one cannot qualify a book page”: Hendriks, “Permanence of Paper,” p. 133. See also David Erhardt, Charles S. Tumosa, and Marion F. Mecklenburg, “Material Consequences of the Aging of Paper,” in Preprints, ICOM Committee for Conservation, vol. 2, twelfth triennial meeting, Lyon, 1999: “Even quite degraded paper retains most of its elasticity, and it is only ‘abuse’, such as folding over a corner, that results in damage. Careful handling is still safe.”
CHAPTER 18 — A New Test
Edmund Gosse: A company called Archival Survival microfilmed Questions at Issue in 1991 for New York University’s preservation department.
I turned the page: Really I should say “I turned the leaf”: bibliographers make a distinction between leaves and pages, there being a page on either side of a leaf. But I’m speaking loosely here.
not have been creased in vain: Linda White, author of Packaging the American Word, the survey of book bindings at the Library of Congress (since suppressed by the library), tested all the books in her sample for brittleness in the approved Library of Congress manner by folding a corner until it broke. She found that only fifteen books, out of 294 she tested (i.e., the 294 she was able to test out of the 400 she took from the catalog as her sample, some of which were missing or Not on Shelf or destroyed after filming), were classifiable (using Library of Congress definitions) as “Brittle Unusable.” (Some of the other books from her sample that had been reformatted and destroyed would presumably have failed their fold tests, too, however.) White told me that in the first ten or so fold tests that she performed, she made fairly big corners, and then they got gradually smaller. “Toward the end they’re just these tiny little things, because I started feeling so guilty about taking those corners off.” She kept the broken-off folds in a Baggie in her desk.
Barrow once took a reporter: “The Paper Man,” Richmond News Leader, June 8, 1963; quoted in Gwinn, “CLR and Preservation.”
CHAPTER 19 — Great Magnitude
Stanford University: Sarah Buchanan and Sandra Coleman, Deterioration Survey of the Stanford University Libraries Green Library Stack Collection, June 1979. “When fold test of 6 folds employed at corner; breaking or tearing occurs when corner tugged gently.” I’m assuming (I hope correctly) that the six folds are single folds, convertible into three double folds.
“in the judgement of experienced”: Robert R. V. Wiederkehr, The Design and Analysis of a Sample Survey of the Condition of Books in the Library of Congress (Rockville, Md.: King Research, 1984), p. 20. Wiederkehr writes that “if a book has paper so brittle that FOLD is 0 to 1, it should be preserved by microfilming rather than deacidification, and is assigned a value for FOLDC1 of 0.”
“The Yale Survey”: Gay Walker et al., “The Yale Survey: A Large-Scale Study of Book Deterioration in the Yale University Library,” College and Research Libraries, March 1985.
“Water leaks occurred”: Gay Walker, “The Evolution of Yale’s Preservation Program,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program, p. 53.
“To get a piece of the action”: Peter Sparks, “Marketing for Preservation,” in Merrill-Oldham and Smith, Library Preservation Program, p. 75.
Haas’s undergraduate thesis: Warren James Haas, English Book Censorship, Thesis, Bachelor of Library Science, University of Wisconsin (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, for the Association of College and Reference Libraries, 1955), Microcard [microfiche]. Haas begins with a quotation from a 1664 pamphlet that he found in Bigmore and Wyman’s A Bibliography of Printing (1884): “Printing is like a good dish of meat, which moderatly eaten of turns to the nourishment and health of the body; but immoderately, to surfeits and sickness.” It looks as if the Library of Congress microfilmed and discarded an original three-volume Quaritch edition (250 copies printed, 1880–1886) of this work.
Preparation of Detailed Specifications: Warren J. Haas, Preparation of Detailed Specifications for a National System for the Preservation of Library Materials (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, February 1972).
“much master negative microfilm”: Haas, Preparation, p. 10. A master can be hard to find sometimes. One survey noted in 1992 that “many micropublishers currently listed in machine readable bibliographic records have moved, sold all or portions of their businesses, or are no longer supplying microfilm copies of masters.” Erich Kesse, “Survey of Micropublishers,” A Report to the Commission on Preservation and Access, October 1992. Robert DeCandido says that “the master has to some extent become a public resource. Certainly a compelling argument can be made that the fate of that film is a matter of public concern and its destruction or loss is against the public interest. In the same way that historic and cultural landmarks are legally protected even if privately owned, so should preservation microfilm masters have some sort of restrictions on their use and disposal.” True, and yet a “microfilm master” is in fact a copy: DeCandido, who ran the Shelf and Binding Preparation Office at the New York Public Library during a period when the library was destroying large numbers of books, fails to extend his analysis to cover the real master — not the film, but the original document. Robert DeCandido, “Considerations in Evaluating Searching for Microform Availability,” Microform Review 19:3 (summer 1990).