Book Review: Baker's Double Fold

If digitizing records or documents of different types is, overall, a good thing in today’s society, Nicholson Baker, in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper surely gives us some sort of warning about the consequences that can take place when people stop thinking. Indeed, his narrative about how some major American Libraries have gone to destroy tons and tons of newspapers and other books, in the name of preservation and lack of shelving room, is quite frightening.
Starting with his discovery that the British Library was about to weed a large amount of foreign newspapers, Baker goes on to describe his struggles to save the American ones, and then weaves a narrative combining his attempts to save those newspapers, with a journey through the situation in the United States. Baker describes how the main philosophy in the United States Library world has been to microfilm so-called too old and too brittle newspapers (and even books), and then destroy the original. If the official reason seems to usually be the preservation of records (they have become too fragile to be used), a disturbing under-lying cause of this destruction was the lack of storage space. Baker mentions that it is more a question of choosing one’s domain of investment, rather than a lack of money. Indeed, microfilming, testing different methods, etc. can be quite expensive, akin to building an additional storage facility for a library. Baker lists several names, describes what they have done, and how they have contributed to the loss of so many newspapers and books. He openly criticizes their methods, their conceptions of preservation and conservation, as well as their continual assault on paper. His explanation of the “double fold test” is quite impressive. I must admit that I could not resist performing that test on my book, however silly it felt. Indeed, Baker asks the right question when he wonders what readers ask of their books and the paper used. They do not ask that the pages survive so many foldings of the corners, but that the pages can be turned, and therefore the books read. It was at times rather startling to read about the different tests or methods invented to “preserve” books; the rule of “reversibility” (you must always be able to undo what you did to a document) does not seem to have been part of those people’s preoccupations.
Baker surely does have a very straightforward and polemical way of writing about issues. Yet, this should not divert our attention from his main concern: What is the point of microfilming documents, and then destroying the originals? If it is in an effort to preserve newspapers, books, or other types of records, that they are microfilmed, this should not lead to the tossing of the paper format. What will happen when microfilms will not be a readable format anymore? What happens when the transfer has been executed poorly and some (or all of) the data has been lost? What will happen when digitization will be more common and projects will come up to digitize those documents? How will the microfilm be transferred to digital?

Those questions will remain present and relevant for a very long time, especially with the growing importance of digitization. Should microfilms or digital formats replace original documents, or should they truly fulfill their “preservation mission”? If they are preservation formats, then the originals surely should not be destroyed. One of the examples I know of is the audio preservation program at the Florida State Archives. What they are doing is transferring into digital format all of their audio collection, making a “preservation copy” in a very high quality, and then making a lower-bitrate copy for the patrons to have access to. The originals are never destroyed, but some of them are in too poor condition to be used on a regular basis, and others are using formats that may be hard to read in a very near future (reels, cassettes). Those audio records are being preserved digitally and in their original form. The care is not only given to the transfer, but also to keep the actual records in the best condition possible.