A Question of Trust
When novelist Nicholson
Baker’s book Double Fold was
published 2 years ago, librarians were outraged. Many still are. But has the
time now come to view the book as a wake-up call for libraries to engage more
actively with the public?
In
writing Double Fold, Baker won few
friends in the library community. This is hardly surprising. While his primary
targets for criticism were the Library of Congress and The British Library, the
book was widely viewed as an unprovoked attack on the profession at large. As
Barbara Quint put it in her June 2001 book review in Searcher, “According to Mr. Baker’s book, librarians have been,
at best, criminally incompetent and, at worst, diabolically malevolent.”
Specifically,
Baker charged librarians with destroying or discarding large numbers of valuable
newspapers and books as part of the deacidification and reformatting programs
that were devised to deal with fragile and “brittle” paper. Not only did he
characterize these programs as incompetent and wasteful, he concluded that the
quality of the microfilm used to preserve the content was so poor that the
originals have often outlasted the film meant to replace them. Far better, he
argued, to spend library budgets on storing originals in an optimal way than
engage in expensive, wasteful exercises in preservation.
While
much of the destruction described in Double
Fold had ceased by the time it was published (and microfilm standards had
improved) Baker maintains that his book retains an important message.
As
he puts it today: “I was trying to tell the history of the preservation
movement—why and how the Library of Congress’ disturbing deacidificational
process preoccupied so many well-meaning people and cost so much and why so much
federal money that could have gone to the paying of librarians and the storage
of the fine things in their care went instead into extremely expensive
microfilming projects that destroyed to ‘preserve.’ One of the reasons to
take a look at history, recent history, is to find out what actually happened
and in doing so to avoid the mistakes in the future.”
Vandals
in the Stacks?
Librarians
have responded to Baker with considerable vigor by writing letters and articles
in defense of the profession and holding meetings and conferences. Last August,
Richard Cox, a professor of information sciences at the University of
Pittsburgh, published Vandals in the
Stacks? in response.
Unfortunately,
the refutations penned by the library community have struggled to counter the
claims made in Double Fold, not least
because many have tended to address other librarians rather than the public at
large.
Certainly,
librarians and archivists appear to be the intended audience of Cox’s book.
His main argument seems to be that since Baker is not a librarian and therefore
doesn’t understand the issues, he should stop moaning and let the
professionals get on with it.
“I
do not want to denigrate the debate into merely a matter of ‘I am a
professional and Nicholson Baker is an amateur,’” he writes. “Yet, the essence of being an expert is in
mastering a specialized body of knowledge and of using that knowledge for a
public good.”
In
other words: The public should trust us. We know what we’re doing.
Trust,
however, is now in doubt. Certainly, Double
Fold has tested the public’s faith in libraries. Most people, had they
given thought to the matter, would have assumed libraries were not in the
business of destroying books and newspapers. Now they’re not so sure.
“Perhaps our preservation administrators and similar library honchos need a
daily reaffirmation of their own Hippocratic oath: First and last, do no
harm,” concluded Michael Dirda in his review of Double
Fold for The Washington Post.
“We
do have to trust librarians, just as we have to trust doctors and lawyers and
all professional people,” Baker says. “And when they violate our trust, as
happened spectacularly in the case of newspaper collections at the Library of
Congress and at The British Library, we have to say so and look into the whys
and the wherefores.”
Echoing
Cox, Abby Smith, director of programs at the Council on Library and Information
Resources, says the problem is that Baker does not sufficiently understand the
whys and wherefores enough to judge. “He doesn’t know very much about how
libraries work, how they are funded, and what their core missions are,” she
says. “He has extremely high expectations of the role of libraries in society,
and he shares those very high expectations with most people.”
It
is this, perhaps, that makes Double Fold
an important book. It has drawn attention to public confusion about the wider
purpose of libraries. Additionally, it has done this at a time when the digital
revolution is set to make significant changes to the way libraries work and
considerably complicate the preservation task. Rather than shooting the
messenger, perhaps librarians should be seeking to better educate the public and
win back its trust.
Library
or Archive?
Above
all, says Janet Gertz, director for preservation at Columbia University
Libraries (but speaking in a personal capacity), Baker confuses the missions of
libraries and archives. “Archives exist to preserve for the long-term,
specific subsets of the published and unpublished human record. Libraries exist
to collect mostly published materials and to make them readily available for use
by as many people as possible. They are not archives responsible for keeping
every single item forever.”
Baker
rejects this as a false dichotomy, pointing out that libraries often fulfill
both functions. “Some critics seem to be fascinated by the idea that I don’t
understand what an ‘archive’ really is,” he says. “This is goofy. My
book is about what happened at big libraries,
mostly over the past 50 years. Archives in general concern themselves with
one-of-a-kind unpublished records, while libraries concern themselves with books
and book-like items. But there is a great deal of blurring between the two
tasks.”
The
point to bear in mind, he adds, is: “If libraries don’t keep what we as a
culture publish and read, who will? Who else will do that primary task? Every
country needs a set of institutions—call them national libraries, call them
archives, call them repositories, it doesn’t really matter—who err on the
side of prudence, who are somewhat indiscriminate in their desire to amass and
hold on to the published record.”
Maybe,
says Jacob Nadal, acting head of preservation at Indiana University Libraries’
E. Lingle Craig Preservation Laboratory, but the reality is that U.S. libraries
don’t have a national responsibility. “Libraries are almost always part of
some parent organization—a town, a university, a company, a law firm—and we
have made that organization our point of accountability. To be blamed by someone
outside of that community for failing to serve a need that our community may
have never expressed to us and then held nationally accountable for this is
strange indeed.”
Even
the Library of Congress, says Abby Smith, “is not specifically mandated or
funded to do the kind of preservation work that he [Baker] expects it to.” She
adds: “We don’t have a national library in the U.S. and we don’t have
someone looking out for American imprints in the way, say, the BnF [Bibliothèque
nationale de France] keeps track of French imprints. We are way too
decentralized.”
But
wait a minute. The ALA’s Web site describes the Library of Congress precisely
as “the national library of the United States.” And according to Guy
Lamolinara, confidential assistant to the associate librarian for strategic
initiatives at the Library of Congress, the library’s mission statement
“requires us to ‘sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge
and creativity for future generations.’”
I’m
no librarian, but is this not what Baker calls for? True, he wants more original
material preserved than librarians feel able to store, but in doing so is he
really asking the Library of Congress to go beyond its own stated mission? Could
it be that librarians are transmitting a confused message to the public?
In
fact, the Library of Congress’ mission sounds somewhat more comprehensive than
that of most national libraries. According to Helen Shenton, head of collection
care at The British Library, the BL’s function is [only] “to preserve and
care for the national published archive.”
It’s
precisely because its mission is limited in this way, explains BL spokesperson
Bart Smith, that in 1999, the library sold a large collection of newspapers.
Baker publicly deplored this sale in Double
Fold. The newspapers concerned, Smith explains, “were foreign in origin
and were originally acquired by the (then) library of the British Museum. They
were acquired in an era when the museum library felt able to collect material
from all over the world, and the long-term problems relating to storage and
preservation were not appreciated.”
Maybe
Baker’s expectations are far too high. Maybe he and the public at large are
confused about the purpose and role of libraries. But are librarians being
sufficiently articulate in explaining matters to them? Circumscribing
preservation efforts to national boundaries does not seem very logical in
today’s global environment. Should there not be an international cooperative
program to better coordinate these activities and share the load?
Artifactual
Value
Tellingly,
as the vituperation and expletives fade away, some librarians are ready to
concede that Baker may have a point, although they’re still smarting from what
they view as a gratuitous attack. “I think Baker’s concerns about the fate
of newspapers and print artifacts in general are very important, and I
essentially agree with them,” says Nadal. “I think it’s unfortunate that
he chose to approach this by writing a polemic against librarians.
“Microfilm,
digital, and paper facsimiles all have their own successes, failures, and fiscal
realities, but none have obviated the value of original items,” adds Nadal.
“Individuals, many of them librarians, are bibliophiles to be sure, but the
libraries are generally more infophilic. We love having information available
and naturally look for better ways to achieve that.”
Have
librarians perhaps placed too much emphasis on providing access and too little
on the artifactual value of the original media? What, in any case, do we mean by
“access”?
“Sometimes
it’s sufficient to have a Gutenberg e-text, sometimes we’d like a paperback,
sometimes we want the particular edition that Keats may have read as he worked
on a sonnet,” argues Baker. “There are all kinds of access, and physical
access—having the physical book or journal at a library ready at hand near
you—is a wonderful boon to scholarship and to the life of the mind. Remote
access—electronically or via interlibrary-loaned spools of microfilm—is
wonderful in a different way, but it’s wrong to insist that remote access
makes direct physical access meaningless or unnecessary in all cases.”
But
if Baker has reminded us of the importance of preserving original materials, how
do we establish what should be collected? After all, points out Cox, “We
cannot save everything, not just because there is too much of it (there is), but
because only a portion possesses value sufficient for justifying the costs for
maintaining the materials.”
According
to Cox, the “hard and informed decisions” have to be made in the interest of
the public good. However, the deeper question is: Who decides what has
sufficient value and who defines the public good? Cox clearly thinks it should
be librarians, saying haughtily, “It may be that some historians and other
humanities scholars are the last true romantics when it comes to using original
newspapers.”
The
Public Good
What
Cox forgets, surely, is that the scholars he so easily dismisses are some
libraries’ customers. The greatest danger any profession faces is to lose
sight of the public it serves or to forget that the public good cannot be
determined by a single group of professionals alone.
While
Cox acknowledges the need for archivists and librarians to “explain
to the public and policy-makers what
it is they do,” he portrays this as a one-way process. In reality, shouldn’t
it be two-way? “I don’t think we have yet learned enough about the compact
between the user of library information and the providers of library
information,” concedes Abby Smith.
However,
Smith adds, library users have been just as negligent as librarians. “The
public has a responsibility to seek information and stay informed. If there were
people who understood the artifactual value of newspapers, they were not vocal
at the time, and that includes Mr. Baker.”
What
seems clear is that libraries need to engage more actively with the public—a
process that will require listening as well as talking. Deborah Perotti, library
preservation coordinator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (but speaking in a
personal capacity), points out: “Librarians need to respond to criticism
because it is a form of evaluation. Evaluation supplies an opportunity to assess
performance and, on the basis of user needs, make changes.”
In
fact, libraries have more to gain than lose here, since an informed public could
help them lobby for the additional resources they clearly need. Gertz says:
“More publicity is needed about the struggle libraries face simply to remain
open, let alone collect widely and preserve everything they have ever owned. If
the public were more aware of what libraries do, they might be more willing to
support them.”
Indeed,
while it obviously hurts to be hectored and pilloried by a nonprofessional, we
shouldn’t forget that Baker is a very accomplished wordsmith who can attract
the media’s attention. Should he not be co-opted to the cause? He is, after
all, a library enthusiast. “I wasn’t trying to undermine the profession of
librarianship,” Baker says. “It’s a great and noble profession, one of the
most important jobs there is. I was trying to get the profession back on
track.”
Public
or Private
There’s
another issue here: If libraries shed original material excessively, might they
unwittingly conspire in the erosion of the public domain?
As
Baker points out in Double Fold, UMI/ProQuest
already possesses “a near monopoly on the reproduction rights for the chief
primary sources of twentieth-century history.” In addition to 20,000
periodical and newspaper titles and the Early English Books Collection (nearly
every book published in English between 1475 and 1700), the company holds copies
of 130,000 out-of-print books and almost 1 million dissertations. Meanwhile,
Readex, a division of NewsBank, holds most of the 18th-century titles in a
collection called Early American Newspapers.
Not
only are these companies able to charge high prices for the end product, but
since microfilm is normally subject to copyright, they’re able to exert
proprietary interests over material that (in the case of anything published
before the 1930s at least) belongs in the public domain.
As
ProQuest Information and Learning attorney Janet Driver explains, where
copyright exists in microfilm, it subsists “from the date of creation of the
microfilm master, not the date of creation of the underlying material being
duplicated. Since microfilm editions are generally created by our employees, the
term of the copyright would be the shorter of 95 years from publication or 120
years from creation.”
This
does not mean that the copyright on the original material is revived, adds
Driver, but simply that reproduction of the underlying material from the
microfilm is prohibited. “If a researcher (or anyone) wants to use the content
and reproduces it from a source other than the copyrighted microfilm, they
can.”
This,
however, assumes that other sources remain available. While the works of authors
like Shakespeare and Mark Twain will undoubtedly always remain in multiple print
copies, other works will not. As Lamolinara concedes, many U.S. newspapers now
exist only in microfilm, and many of these have been produced by commercial
enterprises.
Moreover,
if libraries increasingly replace original material with microfilm, this will
undoubtedly stimulate further microfilming, in turn giving rise to new discards
in a potentially vicious cycle of diminishment. Over time, microfilm could
become the sole source of more and more material, much of which will be
privately owned. For Baker, this “is central to the whole question of why some
public institution has to be charged with keeping originals.”
Some,
however, see little risk. Such a scenario, says Brian Baird, a preservation
librarian at the University of Kansas,
is “potentially real” but unlikely. Besides, he says: “There is little
difference between what UMI does now and what other publishers do now. If a
publisher prints a book, they have a monopoly on that book, and they can charge
what the market will bear.”
Nevertheless,
having established themselves as champions of the public domain in recent years,
librarians would surely be chagrined to face a future charge of having
unknowingly conspired in the privatization of our cultural heritage. It’s
worth noting that no national or international system currently exists to help
libraries establish whether another institution holds a duplicate original
before they discard a book or newspaper series. However, the United States
Newspaper Program is at least attempting to locate and catalog extant issues of
U.S. newspaper titles.
As
we enter the digital age and more and more of the published record is migrated
to the digital environment, preservation issues will become ever more complex.
After all, for the foreseeable future at least, digital data will be far more
fragile than even the most brittle paper. And as proprietary interests in
information increase, ownership issues will surely intensify.
Given
the preservation implications of this transition to digital media, Double
Fold should perhaps be viewed as a reminder to librarians to engage with the
public not just to explain what
they’re doing, but to get folks to buy into it. This matter is now very much a
question of trust.
This
article has been reprinted in its entirety from the July/August 2003 issue of Information
Today with the permission of Information Today, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike,
Medford, NJ 08055. 609/654-6266, http://www.infotoday.com.