Libraries in lurch as microfilm flaws surface

Books, periodicals destroyed in order to conserve space

By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
July 30, 2001

The nation's librarians, popularly viewed as saintly protectors of books, are under siege from critics who charge that in a rush to embrace modern technology, they have purged many shelves of the invaluable raw materials of America's history.

For decades, libraries have been cutting apart older books and newspapers for microfilming, then throwing away or selling the contents--"deacquisitioning" in library jargon.

The goal was to conserve space and convert fragile material into supposedly permanent records. But the result was the loss of irreplaceable originals.

In Chicago, the city's public library filmed a run of the defunct Chicago American newspaper, then sold the originals to a dealer in comic strips. The Center for Research Libraries, a kind of library's library that stores scholarly materials, admits to getting rid of a volume containing rare pamphlets from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

The center also disposed of its run of the Chicago Record-Herald, a newspaper published during the early 20th Century. Nicholson Baker, a novelist who has launched a crusade against such decisions, said, "The sad thing is that there's no way a photograph of a page of a book or a newspaper can be an adequate substitute for the real thing."

Earlier this year, Baker's non-fiction book "Double Fold" accused librarians of the equivalent of treason. The resulting debate may be the biggest dust-up for the usually tranquil profession since its shelvers abandoned the Dewey Decimal System.

Internal dissent Beverly Lynch, acting head of the Center for Research Libraries, is among those who say librarians may have been on the wrong track. "I think Baker's book is the new `Silent Spring,´" she said, referring to the Rachel Carson book that helped launch the environmental movement.

The criticism has prompted a second look at the pluses and minuses of microfilming, said University of Maryland librarian Carlen Ruschoff. "We have learned that we´ve got a lot to learn," she said. Others in the profession accuse the critics of beating a dead horse. "What Baker is talking about happened long ago," said Abby Smith, an official of the Council on Library and Information Resources. "It hasn´t gone on for decades."

Just last year, however, Lynch was worried enough about the materials being lost at her South Side facility that she halted the process. "I said, `Let´s stop and see if we´re doing the right thing,´" Lynch said. "My staff was horrified."

Following a trend According to Baker, that kind of reaction is sadly typical of the attitudes held in professional circles. Among many librarians, the hot action is considered to be newer, alternative ways of perpetuating ideas, such as microfilm and electronic data storage. Baker and others now contend such methods have proved less than perfect and less than permanent.

Not only is microfilm hard to read, it can't capture color photographs, illustrations or advertisements, all of which are important evidence of social history. Nor has the film proved to be quite as imperishable as was touted when the microfilming revolution began in the 1950s. Older microfilms have deteriorated, and others were imperfectly made, with whole columns of print cut off by the camera's lens.

Logically, the medicine for such ills would be to replace defective microfilms with newer ones. Yet that is possible only when the original material was preserved, which is often not the case. No national system

Lacking a national system, individual librarians discarded their newspapers and books, thinking someone somewhere surely must be preserving an original. Writer Henry Petroski recently discovered the reality when he sought back issues of the Long Island Press, which he delivered as a child through the streets of Queens. His forthcoming memoir is titled "Paper Boy."

"I wanted to recapture the feel of it, to reproduce some pages in my book, and you can't get sharp images from the microfilm," Petroski said. And consider the case of this newspaper. The pages of the Tribune have recorded more than 150 years of Chicago history and traditionally have been regarded as the voice of Middle America.

A 1936 inventory of back issues of newspapers stored at local libraries showed that the University of Chicago had a considerable multiyear run of the Tribune. So did the Newberry Library, the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.

A national survey that same year indicated that bound issues of the Tribune could be found in 30 other libraries, in Downstate Illinois and as far away as Galveston, Texas, and Ithaca, N.Y. None of those runs seems to exist today as originally printed, though the American Antiquarian Society does possess a set of issues from the 1860s and '70s. The society, a Massachusetts-based repository for 19th Century documents, acquired the papers from a library that had gotten rid of them.

Baker, who featured the fate of the Tribune in his book, thinks no library has a complete set anymore--and neither does the Tribune. Newspapers, too, bought into the miracle of microfilm. The best place to read the Tribune as it was originally printed, color illustrations and all, seems to be a Rollinsford, N.H., warehouse leased by Baker. In 1999, he discovered that the British Library was about to deacquisition a huge collection of American newspapers. After vainly trying to convince library officials that their collection was virtually unique and should be preserved for scholars, Baker took his and his wife's savings and bought the newspapers. "We're doing what the Library of Congress should have done," Baker said. "The only difference is that they can afford the rent."

The closest thing the U.S. has to a national library, the Library of Congress, played a leading role in the embrace of microfilming. Now its officials concede some potential problems weren't sufficiently considered. "As a community, we let some things get away that we shouldn't have," associate librarian Winston Tabb said.

Good intentions Baker contends the problem of libraries discarding books and newspapers was accelerated by a federally funded project, the Brittle Books Program. A few decades ago, librarians began to worry that books and newspapers printed on cheap paper could deteriorate over time, endangering the nation's literary heritage.

The solution, bankrolled by the National Endowment for the Humanities since 1989, seemed to be to microfilm them before they were lost. The simplest way to do that was to cut their pages apart so they would lie flat. The instrument of choice dropped a sharp blade on the bindings, much as the victims of the French Revolution were executed.