Confessions of a Book Killer

Gather round, and I'll tell you a story.



In 2001 I worked for a large Midwestern research university on a grant from the National Science Foundation. I was tasked with digitizing a collection of books on non-Euclidian geometry.

Hang on. I'll wait here.

You were going to go to this page anyway, right? 

Do you have any questions?

Via Reddit.

Didn't think so.

Some of the books were old, dating back to the seventeenth century. Most were published in the nineteenth century, when non-Euclidian geometry was first recognized as a field worthy of study in Europe.

Back in those heady days, digitization was also called "digital conversion" or "digital preservation," though how these texts were preserved made those phrases sound rather Orwellian. I separated content from container, meaning, I took the books apart. I removed the pages from the covers and spine, and then I took the pages over to a book guillotine, which is exactly what you think it is.

Something like this, via Reddit's r/oddlysatisfying. 

When the blade of a book guillotine presses down the middle pages of a book sometimes bulge out, and text too close to the spine can be lost, so I often had to break up the books into more manageable batches of pages, which I learned the hard way. Text literally cut off by the guillotine had to be obtained via interlibrary loan.

After cutting, I shrinkwrapped the pages, and shipped them to Nogales, Arizona. Then they were trucked across the border to a land that labor and environmental standards forgot, the "other" Nogales in Sonora, Mexico.

Weeks later, I'd get the pages back, along with a CD-ROM full of .tiff (Tagged Image File Format) files. One page per tiff, as you might imagine. Sometimes there was enough room between the text of the cut pages and the spine to rebind the books, but not always. And not usually. And once some of the mathematics faculty found out, they were concerned.

I would perform quality control on these tiff files, making sure they were legible and level, which sometimes included holding a protractor up to a computer monitor. Really. From there, I sent the tiffs to colleagues who ran optical character recognition (OCR) on them, making them text-searchable, or, in today's parlance, discoverable. It took multiple passes through OCR to turn these files into text-searchable files, and the process was fraught with errors. Umlauts, for example, turned any letter below them into two "i"s. Other accent marks turned "e"s into "6"s. It wasn't always pretty. And once some of the mathematics faculty found out, they were even more concerned.

However, no one was as concerned as Nicholson Baker, who was so concerned he wrote a book about the seemingly haphazard ways in which libraries digitized material without regard for the source. Baker's book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, was published as I was chopping up these texts. In Double Fold, Baker cited my boss' boss multiple times, often, according to my boss' boss, out of context. Have a look.


Baker's book sparked a firestorm in the library and information science fields, culminating in an appearance at the American Libraries Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco that June. It was the first ALA Annual I attended.

Anyway, if you come across some nineteenth century non-Euclidian material in a database, that was probably me. You're welcome.

Where are they now?

• My then-boss' boss is now head of the preservation department at the University of Maryland. 

• It later came out that Baker was storing archival materials in a high-humidity environment, a you-store-it warehouse site next to a river in New Hampshire. According to one library listserv, he also used Post-It Notes as bookmarks. He also wrote a book on pacifism and World War II, Human Smoke, that was widely criticized. The Association of Research Libraries website maintains a page on preservation that is, in large part, because of Baker. 

• I felt bad about cutting up some of the books, so I put several third edition texts by Isaac Newton and a first edition Gottfreid Wilhelm von Leibnitz aside. 

• Technological advances: the spread of sophisticated book mounts and cameras, and declining costs associated with them, have limited the above practices.

Elsewhere on this site:

Your Special Collections Won't Save You

The Things They Carried: Preserving User-Generated Content in Course Management Systems

Digital Preservation on the Cheap: Book Mount Edition

Data and the Surveillance State: Toward a New Ecology of Libraries

Image from the film The Lives of Others. It's excellent. Go see it. 

Years from now, we're going to need someone to help us make some sense of the surveillance state (b. 2001), which collects vast amounts of our data, which begets more data about that data.

In short, we're going to need librarians and archivists.

The data that the state collects can and will be used against it later. History has borne this out. Truth and Reconciliation commissions, court cases, oral histories... archives are sites of contestation, of resistance. Archives are an opportunity to build new power structures, to speak truth to official versions of events.

And to ensure that future generations have access to this data, we'll need librarians and archivists right now, too. Privacy is now a good, a commodity, and it's one that information professionals can offer.

Last year I visited the Baltimore Aquarium and was impressed with how conservation was embedded into the building. It's not just a place to see fish, but a place to learn about how to keep those fish around. We need to do this for privacy, for sensible copyright law, and for open access materials, among others.

The ecology of libraries should look more like that of the aquarium.

• Secure browsers, search engines and email platforms, to the extent that these are possible.

• In library instruction "one-shot" sessions, educate patrons not just on how to select sources for a particular task, because: 

our teaching must go beyond tools and skills, so that we can help students understand how information fundamentally works. This means exploring the moral, economic, and political context within which we create and share ideas. Access to information, she writes, is not enough. Our students need to see themselves in the context of "individuals and groups of people actively shaping the world as knowledge producers in a way that renders the consumer-producer dichotomy irrelevant." (The incomparable Barbara Fister quoting Christine Pawley)

• Discovery platforms that take open access, embargoes, and paywalls into account; educating people while they search.

• Notifications in the stacks and the catalog concerning

• banned and challenged books, and 

• items that are affected by copyright extensions.

• Expanding digital literacies to include privacy education. (pdf)

• Staff that can leverage the power of the Internet to stay one step ahead of governments and multi- and trans-national corporations.

• Organizations and member institutions that fight for privacy, like the American Library Association (ALA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). 

• Signage. 

Source is the above link. Glorious, isn't it? 

And more.

We're going to need to, sometime in the future, remind us how and when we lost our damn minds. Let's build for this now.

Elsewhere on this site, related:
The Library as Aquarium, or, The SOPA Post

Your Special Collections Won't Save You

There are people who need a unique item to do research, but those people won't save your library. The same is true of your special collections, your unique items.

Here's how this will go down: The far majority of researchers who use your special collections are going to publish in their niche subjects, read by a handful of their peers, mostly likely in closed access journals. No fame. No fortune. The same old, same old.

All libraries, regardless of who they serve, have to prioritize. No doubt every patron is valuable. Are the above patrons the most valuable in an academic library? I'm skeptical.

Why is this the case? Because those collections are special for a variety of reasons, which cut both ways. There are reasons an item you have is the only copy; often the demand isn't there for more of them. Can we librarians and archivists drive demand? To some extent, yes. To the extent that special collections are what makes an specific academic library desirable for large segments of the communities we serve? Again, I'm skeptical. But hey, try it, because the following scenario might happen.

Special collections moved to an area of prominence, no longer behind closed doors. Unique books and manuscripts were of immense interest, a catalyst for research, integration into the curriculum, student internships, and user-driven content. (Source)

Yes, a modern-day Alexanderia, where people come from miles around to use your special collections and your expertise. Except there's this thing called satisficing, where researchers find items and sources that are "good enough," (pdf) as opposed to the perfect item, which may be tucked away in an archive or special collection. And yes, even tenured faculty practice this behavior at times. And because those special collections are special to us, but maybe not to our communities.

At my place of work (MPOW), we're using Omeka to help us digitize some of our unique collections. We're not doing it because we think doing so will boost our dwindling circulation or use of the library's physical items. We're doing it because we want to preserve our past, our heritage, who we are, for the future. That is part of our mission within our community. We have these resources, and we want to make them discoverable. However, it has never been our top priority, nor do I foresee a time or situation in which that will be the case. We spend far more time, more productive time, "buying love," as Rick Anderson might say.

What I'm particularly concerned about here is that, per usual, discussions of what R1 institutions should do are driving discourse in academic librarianship. Why is this? The far majority of academic librarians don't work at an institution with multiple Associate University Librarians, yet those places seem to dominate the conversation around what academic libraries should be doing. Much of this is because R1 libraries have the staff and budgets that, in theory, allow them to not only have these conversations, but to implement them. The money is necessary, but not sufficient, perhaps. And yes, I'm jealous of those staffs and budgets.

I'm not saying special collections are worthless. I'm saying they're worth less than you think they are and less than the current literature says they are. I'm saying that this probably isn't the hill you want to die on. Go look someplace else. At MPOW, we'll be looking to aquariums and zoos for inspiration.


My favorite response to Rick Anderson's "Can't Buy Us Love" is from Steven Harris.

The Things They Carried: Preserving User-Generated Data in Learning Management Systems.

Like many librarians, I am the product of a distance-learning Masters of Library and Information Science program, which means that I am familiar with using learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard and Moodle as media for delivering courses. Even in brick-and-mortar, face-to-face education, LMS are popular for a variety of reasons. They enable faculty to "flip" classrooms by posting lectures and notes online, serve as a forum for discussions and chats outside of scheduled class time, and are a platform to deliver quizzes and assignments, among other roles.

LMS generate a tremendous amount of data, the far majority of which does not get used again and is lost to history. While faculty can and do copy and export the skeletal structure of courses from semester to semester, the meat of what takes place in an LMS is often thrown away once a class ends. I'd like to change this.

Much of my work in a MLIS program is saved to Google Drive and/or a local hard-drive. But not all of it. I wish I had access to what I had written in discussion forums. And maybe you do, too. Even if you don't in practice, in the abstract it makes sense. Users created that data. Let them have it beyond that semester. It may come in handy later on. Or it may sit in a box like my college notes, but let the users decide. It's their information. They made it.

Though I am often a critic of MLIS programs, the discussion boards of our LMS were useful. They're gone now, which is a shame. It doesn't have to be that way. Moodle, a popular open-source LMS allows for the creation of "portfolios" for users. The sum total of a user's Moodle activity can be downloaded or exported. Here's how. Note that "Portfolios are disabled by default" in this LMS.

I do not know if this option exists in Blackboard, but entire discussion boards can be exported and saved to .zip files. Here's how.

Why MLIS programs? Because librarians, and by extension library science programs, are natural partners for this endeavor. We care about data, about information. We preserve it and make it accessible every day. Except here.

This isn't just talk. I'm working with our Director of Educational Technology to create user portfolios within Moodle that can be downloaded and exported upon graduation or transfer (or drop-out, but let's not talk about that. Yet.). I urge you to do the same. Thank you.

New Year, New Library: Digital Preservation on the Cheap, Book Mount Edition

As we've gained staff this year, we're able to work on some projects that had been on the back burner in previous years, such as taking stock of our woefully neglected rare books room. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a proper accounting of what's in there, and we now have eager part-time librarians and interns who want to learn about preservation, digitization, and the original cataloging that comes with those topics. I repeat: you have not properly preserved nor digitized an item until there is robust metadata to go with it. End rant.

One of our part-time librarians has a nice camera, and has been trained to catalog, so what's left is to train this staff member to preserve and digitize. Book mounts can be remarkably expensive for being a few pieces of foam, but we have a trick up our sleeve: Michael's. Yes, the craft store.

My first library job was in preservation for a small theological library in New York City, where I blew a bunch of money on Mylar, and my third was guillotining and digitizing books at a large Midwestern university (yes, I was there for Double Fold, in which two of my bosses are quoted out of context), so I have some background on this area of librarianship. If you are into preservation, Michael's should be your best friend.

That large foam board is $5.99. The four cones are $3.99 each. Placing two cones on each side, slide them closer or further depending on the angle you want. Those three sheets of felt, with sticker backing, are $.99 each. Use them as needed, on the cones and on the board to reduce slippage and to protect the book or pamphlet. The sum of these materials is $26.42, including Maryland state tax. A book mount costs approximately ten times this. Budgets are tight. Get creative.