paper is a reading mode
and we havent replaced one yet see NYT April 21; “The Paperless Office? Not by a Long Shot”.
I do prefer the New York Times on-line which I get at home, but note that the Home page invites a reader to subscribe for “Home Delivery” to get the paper paper. I would gladly pay for the free on-line subscription which engages both an oral email mode and composite, multimedia on-line mode.
a modest suggestion
The Double Fold response of the library preservation community is easy if we assume that Nicholson’s perspective is justified rather than wrong. From such an assumption the responses flow logically and easily and we regain the initiative. We are already nearly to consensus with Nicholson anyway just as transitions of methods already indicate.
1.stop discard of original materials following reformatting. These “leaf masters” will be provided with explanatory labeling, protective shrink-wrapped and shelved in secure storage.
2. retrospectively, with unique local holdings, inspect for damaged or missing original issues and damaged microfilms of same and make the effort to complete any incomplete collections.
3.install overhead scanning for preservation digitizing from bound materials.
We use these methods at the University of Iowa Libraries.
Such actions will free us to pursue all agendas for archival automation and surrogate copy delivery. They will also direct our services to the preservation of a vital, continuing interaction of orignals and copies.
a moment during a book tour
the following excert is from a longer response, (link from Craig)
“In another way, too, the idea of “everything” is very confusing and allows for the creation of some extremely puffy straw men. A hundred years ago, some of the great newspapers published a million copies a day. Of all those daily issues, 999,998 or so have disappeared–one, sometimes two, remain. This is an unbelievable state of rarity for something that whole cities bought and read every day. More people read the paper than anything else. So, I’m saying that libraries, if they have a run of one of those great papers, ought to keep it, period. Even if it is extremely fragile they should keep it, because (as we are finding now with digital cameras and printers) there will always be new ways of making copies, and we need to have things, whether fragile or strong, to make copies of. Here I’m saying that libraries should save–not “everything” printed–but one-millionth of everything. This is not an unreasonable request–I know it isn’t unreasonable because even I, with no experience at administering anything more complicated than the toothpaste on my toothbrush, was able to rent space in a mill and ship over many tons of newspapers in order to store the last remaining runs of monuments like the Chicago Tribune. The Library of Congress squandered millions on wiggy programs like diethyl zinc deacidification and now outmoded 12-inch optical disk platters (that they thought would allow the library to “miniaturize” and replace its originals)–all that absurdly expensive activity was wasted, and storage buildings weren’t bought or leased, and as a result we have a significantly diminished national collection. We have to learn from that recent example now, as we begin another fearsomely expensive phase of making digital pictures of the pages of books, and build into the copying process a prohibition on guillotining and a requirement for the safe storage of all source originals. In other words–we must keep what we have. Is that saving “everything” or not? I leave that to you to decide. Since we have it on the shelf now, we know it’s physically possible to keep it. Nothing is inevitable. It’s just a question of what we decide to do.
I must take a shower now. Thank you both very much for your thought-provocation–
Nick (April 17)
P.S. Shelving cost figures: There’s an endnote in Double Fold that has specific figures, but let me offer this. Last week I gave a talk at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of Duke University’s storage warehouse. It cost $7.5 million to build, and it will hold about 2.5 million books. In other words, it cost them three dollars a book to build the building, and the overhead will run below 20 cents per year per book. Compare that to the cost of digital scanning or microfilming, which costs in the area of $100 a book, plus $1 a year to store the roll of “master” microfilm in a vault, or some unknown amount per year to keep alive the digital record, as machines and the code that runs them undergo their periodic convulsions of redesign. (Now even Zip disks look as if their days are passing!) Duke’s warehouse is not the way to store all books–because they store them in arbitrary order on 30-foot-high shelves you reach on a cherry picker. But even storing books in the traditional way, in call-number order, on 15-foot-high shelves, would cost only about $6 a book–say, to be safe, $10 a book. Making copies is expensive (which is not to say we shouldn’t do it), storage is cheap. If we set things up so that we tithe 10 percent into a paper conservancy fund as we digitize to provide for the keeping of the originals when we’re done–we’ll be just fine. In fact, at the beginning of a scanned or OCR’d or microfilmed document, it might be nice to read: “No Originals Were Harmed in the Making of This Copy.”
