Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (review)

Double Fold is Nicholson Baker's impassioned plea to preserve newspapers, at any expense. Baker argues that replacing newspapers and books with microfilmed copies is an intentional act of destruction. Unless libraries abandon microfilm, researchers will be deprived of the noble and essential experience of handling newsprint, viewing original illustrations, and reading every word written in every newspaper ever published.

The title of this book comes from a test sometimes used by libraries to determine the condition of paper. Baker argues that double folding guarantees failure and advocates the "double turn" test, in which pages of a book or newspaper are turned as if the reader has read the page, not just the corners of a page. He contends that countless books and newspapers have been discarded by libraries using the wrong test, simply because librarians are too eager to free up shelf space and embrace new technology. Baker dismisses valid reasons for replacing printed works with microform or digitized formats, proposing instead that books and newspapers just be left alone: store them in warehouses, on open shelves, just in case someone, somewhere, sometime, needs to consult them.

The shortcomings of microform as a replacement for newsprint are painstakingly enumerated here. Details of engraved illustrations and photographs are lost to lenses unable to capture them accurately. Microform has a limited shelf life, possibly even more limited than the newspaper it replaced. Historians cannot find first-person accounts of important events because unbinding procedures and inaccurate microfilming have cut off the very words on the very page they need to see—that is, if the historian can even find the proper edition of the newspaper on microfilm; some editions of major daily newspapers have disappeared altogether because that edition was not filmed.

What does Baker ignore? Mission statements inform the community what its governing bodies have identified as the business of the library. Baker never identifies the mission of any library as the destruction of history. Libraries provide free access to information, which is increasingly expensive. Baker says that the problem would hardly exist if libraries had only performed the task they were paid to perform. Such sweeping assertions need better documentation than he offers. Unless a library officially adopts the duty of preserving newspapers and books, and its funding source agrees to support that activity in preference to other equally expensive programs and services, there is no duty to preserve information in its original format. Libraries provide access to information, not to information only in original format.

Baker pays limited attention to developing such technologies as digitization. He hardly discusses the Digital Library Initiative. His objection is that after digitization, the book or newspaper is discarded. But he never considers the big question about digitization: how do we maintain access to formats where the technology is out of date and the information is no longer readable?

His passion for newspapers, as well as an ignorance of user preferences for library service, are evident in Baker's recommendations. So, libraries receiving public money should publish monthly lists of discards on their websites, so that there is some way of determining which libraries act responsibly on behalf of their collections? Regularly scheduled public meetings of library boards already serve this function. The Library of Congress, as a national repository, should house everything sent by publishers? Baker does not distinguish between fiction, nonfiction, single copies, or overruns. In his reasoning, publishers are better judges of quality that are historians or librarians. His suggestion that libraries should begin to save current newspapers in bound form offers little evidence that he understands the scope of such a project. How many editions of how many newspapers should be preserved? How would this be funded and organized? His final recommendations: abandon or modify the Brittle Books Program and the U.S. Newspaper Program, microfilm and scan materials by nondestructive methods, and then save the originals...