When I was a kid, one of the most magical places that I could think of was the Library of Congress - in my imagination, it was the hugest building in the world and had every single book ever written in it and was staffed by friendly librarians who valued the written word.

I'm crushed. I feel like I just found out Santa Claus doesn't exist, except this is worse, because I really believed. Man.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Answers

Lynda, you just broke Jeremy's heart. He said, in a very small voice, "You mean there isn't someone who has all the books?"

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

I'm crying with him, trust me!

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

I've been crying for a while, and I'm cheering for Nicholson Baker's crusade to save paper, but at the same time let's not rush to demonize microfilm. Microreproduction democratized history and literature research so that people didn't have to travel as much to do it. Weblog entry here.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

I don't think microfilm itself is being demonized* - it's the destruction of the paper versions, as if there is no value in the media itself (as the article points out in one place, libraries cost estimate it by saying 1 microfilm copy lets them destroy 5 bound copies).

There's just something ***wrong*** about librarians and archivists destroying books or the Library of Congress being run like a CIA operation. Wrong on a very gut level with me - I may have gotten over the childhood idea that 'the policeman is our friend', but the librarian was supposed to be all about being the defender of the books!

Microfilm is a fantastic tool, but it shouldn't be a replacement for the originals. And it seems that those promoting it must know that, or they wouldn't have needed to be so cagey about the reasons why - shouldn't it have sold on the merits you mention?

In the Atlantic Monthly article, the author says: "What's frustrating to people who do research is when a bunch of staff members at a library decide that one way of doing research is the right way, and one way is a waste of time, and they make it impossible for you to do it that way. This is really what's going on right now. Libraries have decided that if you've got the information on JSTOR, the journal storage database funded by the Mellon Foundation, then it's okay to get rid of the bound volumes. Well, in many cases, you can find great stuff on JSTOR, but I happen to know, from paging through year after year of Microform Review, that sometimes you find things you wouldn't otherwise find by reading the journals as they were originally designed to be read. I don't know why there always has to be this rhetoric of substitution. I thought we would have learned by now that AM radio continues despite the arrival of FM radio, that all these things layer on top of each other."

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

True. Baker does rant about the shortcomings of microfilm in the New Yorker article that was his manifesto, though, and that's what I'm flashing on. (It's also reprinted in The Size of Thoughts, I think.) He goes on about how microfilm doesn't preserve the colors of cartoons and it's sometimes out of focus and it doesn't have all the pages of the regional editions. All I can think is, yeah, but it's better than nothing.

He just got a little bit carried away there. As a packrat, I'm 100% behind his idea that we should keep everything in all possible formats, and appalled that "the nation's attic" isn't big enough for this. (Or is the nation's attic the Smithsonian? Then maybe the LoC is the nation's garage.)

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

I wouldn't call that a demonization - it's a fact of the limitations of microfilm (along with the necessity of having the proper equipment to view it, just as a limitation of paper is the space necessary to contain it and (as you pointed out) the increased difficulty of it being available without travel in some cases.

His focus seems to be much more on the unnecessary and (it appears) duplicitious demonization of paper.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

One last thought on this, and I don't know if the author even addressed it... Paper is nice and low tech - assuming literacy still exists a few hundred years from now and the language hasn't totally sunk into obscurity, it'll still be readable.

What's the guarantee or even likihood that anyone will be manufacturing microfilm readers even 150 years from now? At that point, what happens to all the publications that were stored *only* on microfilm?

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Like most of you freaks here, I have a serious (and unnatural, according to my grandfather) appreciation for the printed word. But I just can't get too worked up about this. Aside from some admittedly awful decisions by the occasional librarian, the discarding of many printed items results in no serious loss to humanity. I accept that there are physical limits on what we can store (and having spent more time than I wanted (imagine that!) in the LOC, I'm well aware of those physical limits), and accept that there won't be a complete record of everything published- literary triumph or illiterate scribble.

As to important things on microform, I imagine they'll eventually be transferred to more stable long term storage mediums (if they're not already rotted, of course). I've got text documents from my first efforts on a Mac in 1984 somewhere- the words sure didn't get to 2001 by me preserving them in their original form.

I just can't be too upset- perhaps if we were talking about illuminated scrolls or something, I could be. But would you really find it worthwhile to archive and maintain the accumulated works of Rudeboy?

[rude, you're not allowed to answer that- anyway, what are you doing on a thread 'bout books?]

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

Being a historian I almost developed brown lung disease because of the bad quality of 19th century paper in archives and libraries. Too much cellulose in the paper makes that old books and newspapers crumble and simply desintegrate. Some things just aren't meant to last. Every information bearer will lose its desintegrate some time. But hell, I have colleagues that still mourn the destruction of the Library of Alexandria (3th Century AD). Just to know what could have been known, yet never will be...

-- Anonymous, May 22, 2001

Every time I hear "The Library of Congress" all I can think about is those shitty vanity poetry anthologies. You know, the kind every would-be poet claims to have been published in. Costs you thirty bucks just to see your poem in print and it's surround by some of mankind's worst verse. Fine with me if they burn all those books and the Library of Congress too. Any organization responsible for printing that much trash and taking advantage of new writers is not a place worthy of my tears.

Besides, if anybody wants to know where all the books are, try my living room and bedroom. Between the two, you're bound to find what you're looking for. Though I admit I abandoned the Dewey Decimal System years ago. It's a hunt and find kind of operation.

-- Anonymous, May 22, 2001