Hie Silent Boolcs of the Future: Initiatives to Save Yesterday's Literature for Tomorrow
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LOGOS Hie silent boolcs of the future: initiatives to save yesterday's literature for tomorrow Patricia Battin Americans call the ptoblem brittle books. To the Nofwegians, it's sour books - sure boker - and to the Germans, Broselbuch, or the book of crumbs. But the French use the subtlety of their language to pro ject the true horror of the world's potential loss - livres incommunicables, or silent books. If books are silent, our history is lost to us. Estimates vary from country to country, President, since 1987, of the from library to library, but data exist to corroborate US's Commission on Preserva' that approximately 25% of the world's great collec tion and Access, Patricia Battin tions are progressively turning to dust because of the is a career'long academic librari' alum sizing introduced into paper making around 1850. The alum reacts with moisture in the air to an. From 1978 to 1987 she was break down the cellulose wood fibres that give paper Librarian of Columbia University its structural strength. If swift and drastic action is and a member of the Research not taken, the great voices of 19th century scholar Library Group, chairing its Board ship will be stilled far more effectively and finally than by war, flood, censorship or fire. of Governors in 1985/86. A Phi In the United States, we estimate that Beta Kappa graduate of 80% of the materials in our libraries and archives Swarthmore College and are published on acid paper and will inevitably Syracuse University, Battin has cfumble. The Library of Congress alone reports that served the US library community 77,000 volumes in its collections move each year from the "endangered" state to brittleness and in many capacities and has spo' thence to crumbs. Other countries have docu ken and written extensively on mented similar disasters. The German Library the future of libraries. The Institute estimates that of the 152 million volumes Association of College and in research libraries of the Federal Republic of Germany, some 27% or forty million volumes need Research Libraries named her as immediate tteatment if they ate to be saved for Academic/Research Librarian of future generations. Assessments in other countries the Year for 1990. reveal similarly pessimistic estimates. Librarians have a long history of support ing intellectual freedom and fighting censorship so that information can flow freely to all citizens. Although we're well aware of the titles of books that have been banned over the years, we have been inexplicably slow to respond to the frighten ing specter of "chemical censorship''. As early as 1891, Justin Winsof, then librarian of the Boston 11 LOGOS 2/1 © WHURR PUBUSHERS 1091 Battin Public Library, predicted, in an unsuccessful attacking the problem in our traditional single-item attempt to alett librarians and publishers to the salvation approach - and getting nowhere fast. In threat of acid paper, that some future bibliographer the US, if we had proceeded at our pre-1989 pace would construct an ingenious theory to explain the of an approximate - and optimistic - total of absence of books published after 1870. One hun- 40,000 filmed volumes a year in an unco-ordinated dted years later, no ingenious theory is needed - the fashion throughout the research library community, "yellow snow" of crumbling paper drifting continu with little attention paid to duplication, it would ously ftom the bookstacks of our libraries and have taken us 2,000 years at a cost of approximately archives provides the vivid and devastating answer. $8 billion to film all the deteriorated volumes in Probably every medium we have used to our large research collections alone - approximately record the creativity of the human spirit, since we eighty million volumes of eleven million unique moved away from stones, is subject to deterioration. items. In actuality, the cost would be somewhat less, Indeed, it seems that the more sophisticated our since most of the books - as well as the preservation technology becomes, the flimsier the medium we librarians - would have turned to dust long before employ for storage. Have we permitted our enviable we could rescue them. If ever there was an argu record of technological advance to devalue the ment for both cooperative action and re-examined assumptions, those figures make the case. The facts ...a civilized society become much less demoralizing if we conceive of ignores, at its own peril, the challenge from a cooperative perspective and the validity and value of the recognition that difficult choices must be made. 79 Valiant as our cottage-industry efforts were, we the accumulated record of finally recognized that any effort short of a nation the human spirit ally co-iiidinated mass-production effort would be throughout history. inevitably overwhelmed by the inexorable rate of continuing deterioration. experience of the past - to engender the belief that The promise lies in the unprecedented the explosion of new knowledge is happening so opportunity to exploit new technologies fot the fast it makes the wisdom of yesterday irrelevant to generation, storage, dissemination and use of tomorrow? It is indeed true, as the current conven knowledge in ways that will utilize new technical tional wisdom dictates, that the technological capacities and meet the information demands of an society must invent new paradigms for ttaditional electronic global society. As the magnitude of the social and cultural organizations. It is the natuie of ptesetvation challenge became better understood paradigms to change and alter in response to exter and considerably more urgent as each year's toll nal realities, but a civilized society ignores, at its added to the volumes at risk, the American library own peril, the validity and value of the accumu community recognized that the rate of decay and lated record of the human spirit throughout its the enormous costs of remedial action would con history. Although the traditional research library, a tinue to defeat the heroic efforts of individual 19th century paradigm with functions and services libraries, archives and consortial organizations. We designed to meet the needs of a pre-electronic soci also realized that we had to redefine the "preserva ety, must change to meet the needs of the 21st tion problem" from a single-item technical solution century, its contents are ageless. We have a dual to a broad strategy for providing access to the obligation to our successors - preserve the sub human record as far into the future as possible. Too stance while creating new forms ot storage and many changes were occurring in the traditional access. chain of scholarly communication to justify the The fragility of acid paper has created continuation of traditional approaches. both a disaster and an opportunity of monumental Several major considerations could not be proportions. On the disaster front, we are losing at ignored: an alarming rate an enormous portion of our knowl — the growing rate and enormous volume of the edge base. Until recently, we had been diligently deterioration of our paper-based knowledge 12 .