In the 1990s, conscious that their old, stately buildings were no longer able to contain the flood of printed matter, the directors of several major libraries decided to erect new premises to lodge their vast collections.
Patrice Moore's book-clogged apartment in New York City.
In Paris and London, Buenos Aires and San Francisco (among others), plans were laid out and construction began. Unfortunately, in several cases the design of the new libraries proved ill suited to house books. To compensate for the deficient planning of the new main San Francisco Public Library, in which the architect had not allowed for a sufficiently large amount of shelving space, the administrators pulled hundreds of thousands of books from the library's hold and sent them to a landfill. Since books were selected for destruction on the basis of the length of time they had sat unrequested, in order to save as many books as possible, heroic librarians crept into the stacks at night and stamped the threatened volumes with false withdrawal dates.76
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To sacrifice the contents in order to spare the con- tainer—not only the San Francisco Public Library suffered from such an inane action. Even the Library of Congress in Washington, "the purported library of last resort," became the victim of equally irresponsible behaviour. In 1814, during negotiations by the American Congress to purchase the private library of former American president Thomas Jefferson—to replace the books British troops had burned earlier that year after occupying the Capitol Building in Washington—Cyril
King, the Federalist Party lawmaker, objected, "The Bill would put $23,900 into Mr Jefferson's pocket for about 6,000 books—good, bad and indifferent; old, new and worthless, in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not to." Jefferson answered, "I do not know that my library contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection: there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."77
Over a century and a half later, Jefferson's observation has been all but forgotten. In 1996, the New Yorker reporter (and best-selling novelist) Nicholson Baker heard that the Library of Congress was replacing most of its enormous collection of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century newspapers with microfilms and then destroying the originals. The justification for this official act of vandalism was based on "fraudulent" scientific studies on the acidity and embrittlement of paper, something like defending a murder by calling it a case of assisted suicide. Several years of research later, Baker reached the conclusion that the situation was even worse than he had at first feared. Nearly all major university libraries in the United States, as well as most large public libraries, had followed the Library of Congress's example, and some of the rarest periodicals no longer existed except in microfilmed versions.78 And these versions are faulty, in many ways. Microfilms suffer from smudges, stains and scratches; they cut off text at the margins, and often skip entire sections.
The microfilming culprits were not all American. In 1996 the British Library, whose collection of newspapers had, to a large degree, escaped the bombings of the
Second World War, got rid of more than sixty thousand volumes of collected newsprint, mainly non- Commonwealth journals printed after 1850. A year later, it chose to discard seventy-five runs of Western European publications; shortly afterwards, it gave away its collections of periodicals from Eastern Europe, South America and the United States. In each case, the papers had been microfilmed; in each case, the reason given for the removal of the originals was space. But as Baker argues, microfilms are difficult to read and their reproduction qualities are poor. Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the
The Library ofCongress, Washington, D.C.
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ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words. (Columbia University's librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion. "The value," she wrote, "in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily estab- lished."19 There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading.)
But above all, the argument that calls for electronic reproduction on account of the endangered life of paper is a false one. Anybody who has used a computer knows how easy it is to lose a text on the screen, to come upon a faulty disk or CD, to have the hard drive crash beyond all appeal. The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD- ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh- century census of England compiled by Norman monks. More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded "life in Britain" during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve- inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data,
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The Domesday Book in sections, in its present state.
but none was entirely successful. "There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem," said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. "Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost."80 By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable.
The director for the electronic records archive program at the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States confessed in November 2004 that the preservation of electronic material, even for the next decade, let alone for eternity, "is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals."81 Since no clear solution is available, electronic experts recommend that users copy their materials onto CDs, but even these are of short duration. The lifespan of data recorded on a CD with a CD burner could be as little as five years. In fact, we don't know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed on a 2004 CD. And while it is true that acidity and brittleness, fire and the legendary bookworms threaten ancient codexes and scrolls, not everything written or printed on parchment or paper is condemned to an early grave. A few years ago, in the Archeological Museum of Naples, I saw, held between two plates of glass, the ashes of a papyrus rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. It was two thousand years old; it had been burnt by the fires of Vesuvius, it had been buried under a flow of lava—and I could still read the letters written on it, with astonishing clarity.