The Cultural Identity of American Libraries

Could we ask the junior fellows in the Churchill scholars to kind of help us fill up the main table

here so we won’t feel quite so lonely at this end of the table?

This will be a discussion with two distinct

parts to it. Our speaker will be introduced by Steve Ellis,

the director of the Harry Ransom Center. Our speaker

herself, Ellen, will tell us about some of the work that she does here at the

HRC and some of its historical background. And then Don Davis will link

up to another part of the discussion, which is the cultural identity of American

libraries. We want to be sure to leave lots of time for discussion.

And so we’ve extracted a promise from Don Davis to speak no more than five minutes.

Now, whether or not this will actually happen, we will wait and suspense to see

Steve. Let’s let you go. So

British studies is very familiar with researchers who have been working

in the ransom center collections, then occasionally coming in and delivering the results

of their research here at the British studies seminar. We also are very

proud of the fact that we have great subject expertise among the professional staff of the ransom center.

And so it’s a particular delight today to introduce my colleague, Dr.

Ellen Cunningham Krupa. Ellen is associate director

for the Ransom Center’s Preservation and Conservation Division. And in that role,

ensures the best possible care for the center’s collections as associate

director. She also serves on the scene on the center’s senior leadership

team, a group providing strategic direction for

the institution wide leadership. Ellen is a graduate of U.T.

I should say a three time graduate of U-T. Did her undergraduate work here?

Her master’s in library and information science. And a p_h_d_ from American

Studies Department. She’s also done advanced graduate work at Columbia

University. A particular research interest of Elon’s

is the history and growth of the conservation field. And this was the subject of

her p_h_d_ dissertation and the subject of her forthcoming book,

Moring A Field Paul in Banks and the Education of Library

and Archives Conservators. Ellen is a widely respected

leader in the conservation field, and she’s deeply committed to the training and mentoring

of the next generation of conservators. It’s a pleasure to work with her and a great

pleasure to introduce her to this afternoon in the British studies. Please join me in welcoming Alan.

Three of you just got done was on. Okay. All

right.

Steve, thank you very, very much. This is like a dream job

for me, frankly, to be here at the ransom center. And I am thankful

to Steve everyday for hiring me and for giving me such a wonderful working environment

for my remainder of my career career. So it’s really fun being here

with you guys today. It’s very rare. I would say very, very rare for someone

who talks about conservation history to have such an interdisciplinary crowd.

My field tends to talk to itself a whole lot. And it’s for good reasons.

And we haven’t had sort of the space in other audiences necessarily to talk

about our work or really there’s not there’s only a couple of historians in our field.

So this is a real pleasure. And I, more than anything, look forward to hearing your particular

questions this afternoon, because that’s the way my work is gonna get better.

It’s very selfish reasons here. It’s the way my work will get better is by hearing from a lot of different

voices in perspectives. So I’m gonna apologize a little bit up front. I

think that might do this. We read a little bit. It’s easy for

me to get off track a bit. I can find all kinds of tangents to any topic is

my esteemed director will confess. So,

again, thank you. And I want to tell you a bit about the focus of my scholarship to

date. It’s been on the post-World War Two history of the field of cultural records, conservation,

and particularly the specialty area within the field that service research, libraries and archives

rather than art collections. I’m especially interested in the disciplinary

nature of the field and the heart of my work interrogates why libraries and archives? The library archives

specialization has had so many difficulties establishing itself in an area of study

in the academy. And then once it finally did, staying there and we

don’t have time really to examine the latter question in any detail. But so I went today.

I really want to just introduce the field to you a bit about what it is and

what it does. And from there, I’ll share with you a story, one that I think illustrates at least one

of the primary reasons. Library Archives Conservation was tethered in particular to a nonprofessional

status in research libraries beginning in the 19th, well, 1960, 70s

into the 1980s. And at times still.

So how many of y’all have been in a conservation facility before? Oh,

awesome. Fantastic. Well, we need to rectify. For those of you who haven’t, maybe Roger

will allow us to do a tour one Friday of our preservation and conservation

operations. Because we do a lot of interesting things and we’d love to show them off

that we get to be fun. Can’t bring your sherry, but yeah.

So in a nutshell, conservation is the field of scholarship and practice dedicated to preserving for today

and for decades and even for centuries to come. The records of human thought, creativity and

discovery. These records reside in libraries, archives and museums of all kinds

historic houses, churches, homes, historical societies, police departments and the like.

When I use the term culture record, I’m referring to documents and expressions, tangible and intangible,

from literary to artistic to scientific to legal to anthropological that emanate

from and represent wide ranging contexts, intentions and uses.

While many might refer to this equally as cultural heritage, I’m intentionally working against that particular

terminology to provide a more solid grounding to how we theorize and act on behalf

of cultural records. There are so many problems with the notion of heritage, as you well aware.

And equally, if patrimony and property heritage in particular is a very normalized

term in our society, yet it’s very slippery when that continues to be

easily deployed to arouse emotions, positive or negative. And in

that derailing, we’re consciously redirecting attention from concerns that, in fact, require

substantive, grounded thought in action. So why do we need to take care

of? Why do we need to be diligent, take deliberate measures to preserve and protect cultural

records over the years of a records life? It may face all kinds of factors that put it at risk

of damage, deterioration or destruction. Culture records are commonly exposed to excessive light,

temperature and humidity extremes, pest pollutants, poor handling practices and natural and human made

disasters. They’re neglected. What? Too, sometimes in our field is benign

neglect, in other words, you just don’t do anything. And as we witnessed under

Naziism and were recently in Iraq and Syria, cultural records are highly vulnerable during wartime.

And in times when political or religious regimes are in flux, they’re deliberately

destroyed in an attempt to eradicate cultural memory, conservators or professionals who are

skilled in science based treatment and preservation of these cultural records. Chemistry

and material science heavily inform the conservators work. Students

enter a graduate program with solid coursework in organic and inorganic chemistry, then proceed

to take many more courses in their studies in general, conservation, science and applied materials science,

the latter involving the study of primary Rotarians. The things that comprise

primary material such as polymers, adhesives and proteins,

metals and things like that. Their studies focus on techniques of examination, analysis,

documentation, treatment and preventive care. Science and highly practiced hand skills

work together to allow the conservative to stabilize the structure of a material object

and at times reintegrate the appearance of deteriorate cultural artifacts.

In terms of prevention, conservators establish use, exhibition and storage policies and practices

to ensure the preservation of the objects in their care. So, for example, every item that you

see in an exhibition at the Ransom Center has actually passed through the view of

one of our specialized conservators and either books, photos or paper to determine

its fitness for exhibition, sometimes to stabilize it. In the case of books,

books open at different comfortable degrees of open ability. And so we work with our

exhibition preparatory to actually prescribe how far a book can be opened for viewing.

Conservators do a good bit of research in their works and of historical and technical and undertake scientific

studies on objects to better understand their makeup and their vulnerabilities. They collaborate

with curators, scholars, scientists to explore the physical and socio historical meanings

of cultural records and history seen. If you read The New York Times, every once in a while you’ll

see some really interesting article about something, a good find that a conservator has

made working on a painting or working on a manuscript.

So in their graduate studies, conservators specialize in a particular material a group of objects such

as paintings or on paper, textiles, library and archival materials, photographs, archaeological

or indigenous material, sculpture, furniture or decorative objects. So there’s a why it’s a very broad

field and people very much specialize in this field. So the first graduate

program for conservators in the US opened in 1961 at NYU and the Institute of Fine

Arts, and it was followed by the graduate program at Cooperstown, New York. And in this case,

it was the Sunni system that conferred the master’s degree, followed in 1972

by the Winter Term Museum in Delaware, partnering with the University of Delaware to open a master’s degree

program. All of these programs were very specifically geared to art conservation. And

they named themselves as such as art conservation programs. So it wasn’t until

University and the School of Library Service. The program educated conservators specifically for

our research, libraries and archives. Now there are really tangled reasons

why conservation of library and archives collections was slow to the table. And why

in 1981, it ended up in a library science program versus an art conservation

program. If you kind of just can go back to the moment these

these collections aren’t art, are they? Some are, but some aren’t. But particularly

in past decades, they reviewed is pretty middlebrow, relatively low value commodities on

the auction block compared to their artistic cousins. And the ransom center was built on

these kinds of collections. But nowadays, their value on the market is significantly different.

They’re also pretty everyday, right? Many cultural records are handwritten or typed

in the familiar and unsexy book form typed on Narseal paper, recorded on everyday tape

recorders, et cetera. And they’re touched all the time during use. They’re not just viewed, as you

might view, an art object in a museum. Federal public libraries

and libraries themselves is collecting. Institutions alike were slow to support preservation of these

collections. The Library Congress didn’t hire its first conservators until the early 1970s

near a public library, didn’t have a conservation led to the mid-70’s. Colombian Yale didn’t have programs

until the 70s, and even neither of those latter programs had a conservator at

first. It took them years to hire a conservator. Frankly, there just were very few

conservators to. Higher, given that there weren’t educational programs to produce them. They’re

definitely, most definitely was a small Cordray of conservators in the US before the program

opened at Columbia, but they basically were uncredentialed in that they didn’t have degrees

that the library profession would have recognized as professional equivalent equivalents to those held by

librarians. So given that 70 percent, 70 percent

of the nation’s cultural record holdings are in libraries and archives, it’s difficult

for us today to fathom that we did not have preservation programs and the preponderance of our nation’s

libraries, including Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Berkeley, the Ransom Center and

the U.T. libraries until the 1980s. And we didn’t have a professional education program

as well, of course. So why was that the case? Well, let’s dove

in just a bit and look at a couple of examples of what was going on. So

cultures keep records for various reasons, some sort of legal or economic purpose

purposes. Others tell the story of individual and collective histories, and some are valued for their unique

or rare aesthetic and artistic offerings throughout the centuries. The impetus to preserve

cultural records writ large and talking really in a large sense here buildings, art

books, histories and memories has emanated from and served wide ranging purposes. Human

nostalgia. Self-aggrandisement nation making. Community building. Economy

building. Scholarship, pleasure since making of the past and foretelling of a future.

All of these motivations were in play after World War Two in the US. After the war,

the nation trumpeted economic prosperity, low unemployment, scientific and technological

superiority, an unparalleled educational opportunity. We were keen to be seen as

a progressive nation, sending rockets into orbit and putting humans on the moon. Yet beneath

the veneer of stability, strength and progress, the nation wrestled with the dissonance

of Cold War tensions, political assassinations, racial unrest, involvement in a very unpopular

war, and the resultant range of social and political movements in response to those.

The fabric of this postwar era can be seen as an interweaving of progress in a range of destabilisation

that ultimately engendered a rich discourse centered on regaining a past increasingly

distant, diminished and threatened by modern progress. Notions of American heritage

and its preservation became key in this discourse. Equally serving agendas ranging

from capitalist interests to nation building to ethnic studies to saving the environment

in historic buildings. In my work, I’ve tended to focus really heavily

on the language that actors used, be they individuals, funding agencies,

institutions or governing bodies and how they describe themselves in what they’re

trying to accomplish or what they’re working against sometimes. So before we move on,

it’s useful, I think, to the rest of my story to unpack some ideological and semantic binaries,

ones that were deployed to emphasize a perceived rift between what was seen as the traditional

versus what we’ve often understood as modern and progressive. Glenn Adamson

argues in the invention of craft that during the industrial revolution there was a cleavage

between, for example, craft which is closely associated with working with one’s hands

and other more objective ways of making and knowing. He suggests, and I certainly

agree, that those binaries continue to linger in our cultural narratives and value hierarchies

in our society. Adams and demonstrates that what once had been an undifferentiated complex

of human production evolved into a stet a set of these constructed binaries.

So craft industry, freedom, alienation, tacit explicit hand

machine, traditional and progressive. Time and again, these dualities that Adams

and identifies rub and tussle in the published in archival documents, correspondence

and actions that I’ve examined in my research these past 10 years. The craft

aspects of library and archives, conservation, the hands skills that our conservators use

have often tethered it to this modern, non modern non-progressive side of the binary

and hence a position of inferiority. Indispensability in

the post-World War 2 environment where you have a mix of nation building and countermovement responses.

It’s fascinating to witness how actors co-opt language to describe which side of these preceived

binaries they land in. Sometimes you have to dig deeply to untangle the motivations

embedded in semantic representations. For example, you might think that the nation building

power of science and economic progress would have been natural bedfellows with patriotism and nationalism.

And they were. But we witness a new injection of heritage language such as. Replace

ability, vanishing culture, authentic natural

beauty that was closely aside, tied to the social movements such as environmentalism,

historic preservation and heritage, co-mingling in the same sentence, promoting democracy, stability,

scientific achievement and the like. For example, John Fitzgerald Kennedy

wrote in Stuart Udalls The Quiet Crisis in 1963, which address

the nation’s environmental concerns that if the nation allowed nature to continue on the path

of deterioration, the very quote, foundations of national power would weaken.

In the case of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the federal government

established that America’s future in both spiritual and economic

would be built upon the nation’s historic heritage. The language of the act deviated dramatically

from previous historic preservation laws. Never before had the federal government even

used the term heritage and historic preservation law, nor had it previously declared

the nation’s historic properties vital to community life and development.

These are just a couple of examples of how the progress and countercultural narratives intermingled

in a very strange brew. A handful of library conservators

began to theorize their work beginning in the early 1960s. But even more so in the latter half of

that decade, the language that they used was similar to that of art conservation

to that of Art Conn’s conservators. And it reflected both sides of the progress

and tradition binary. Words and concepts that is historically denoted the traditional and

non intellectual. For example, craft and bookbinding co-mingled with those considered progressive,

such as science and technology. Those who could institutionalize and fund conservation,

however, oftentimes misunderstood or just plain disregarded how the fledgling

field described its philosophy and work, particularly book conservation

had a distinctive anti-modern impulse associated with the show. Social movements of the time.

At the same time, the budding library conservation field was moving towards a solid scientific basis for

its work. It presented itself philosophically and semantically, oftentimes

in non modern terms linked to the past. We work on stuff that was made in the

past, right? That’s part of it inside.

Note this is this is still going on. You know, I see Mike, my colleagues, I’m sort of their

thorn in their side at times saying, you know, please don’t put that image of some old

bookbinder, you know, from the 17th century, you know, on your wall

and say, that’s what we do. So it’s semantic

choices suddenly undermined the case. The field was attempting to make for itself with research,

library directors and funders. So just a little more history here. The lineage

of book conservation is from. In particular, the arts and crafts movement and William Morris.

And that was, of course, a movement that was a backlash against, you know, the modernist

moment in the late 19th century. The language and imagery that are part of that movement

remain part and parcel of our DNA.

In the 1960s and 70s, directors of the nation nation’s largest research libraries

certainly held this view of what they thought conservators could offer it to progressive research library agenda.

On the heels of World War 2, the nation’s research libraries boomed with business concurrent with America’s

increasing emphasis on higher education and white collar workers. At the end of the

academic year 1940, 950. Half a million degrees were awarded 17

times more that were conferred 50 years earlier. In forty seven,

some 2.3 million students were enrolled in over eighteen hundred four year and two year institutions.

Rapid and constant growth in the higher education system continued until about 1962.

The growth of academic library collections mirrored that growth of higher education. Few libraries

collected broadly or deeply enough for serious research in the 1920s and 30s.

However, is post-secondary educational institutions expanded dramatically? The growth of

their library collections catapulted both due to the growth of research output from these

new scholars and the need to support growing areas of study and research concomitant

with its funding of higher education. The government provided research support for research libraries

to build their collections. Some of you may have heard of the Farmington plan that was funded for almost

over Europe, Eastern and Western, buying materials and bringing them back and selectively

placing. Libraries to create spent areas of specialization within research libraries.

Member institutions of the Association of Research Libraries have long been the dominant centers of graduate

research in education in the US. In 1951, the average research

library collection held just under nine hundred thousand volumes by nineteen eighty five.

The average tripled the real growth in a research library. Collections occurred between

Average total operating expenditure, salaries, books and periodicals and binding costs increased

on average twenty two fold during the same period. So within this environment

of national academic progress and the congruent growth and management of voluminous library collections

emerged a dialog focused on their preservation. In particular, the Association

of Research Library Directors, which I’ll I’ll start referring to as ARRL began to worry

in the early 60s about managing brittle paper in their burgeoning collections. Have you all.

Some of you all been familiar with the issue of brittle paper?

Many of the collections they had been building, some from developing countries producing for paper

stock or producing their publications during wartime when paper stock tends to be

at its worst. And were published after 1840 when paper production moved from using linen

and cotton rags as the source to use a ground wood pulp mixed with the range of additives,

which leads to more rapid deterioration of the paper.

The directors thought that the only way they could address what they understood as a mass brittle paper problem

was to turn to systems oriented technological solutions. What became appropriately

named and which are my field is totally normalized as mass microfilming and mass

district distribution through microfilming, masti, acidification and high density

storage build stacks up thirty six feet high in Peckman.

It’s not bad, but I’m just saying so.

Preserving brittle book collections dominated the national conversation about preserving

library collections for better part of three decades, beginning in the early 60s

and reaching far into the 1980s and even into the 1990s.

In the 1960s, the Council Library Resources, which all refer to it as the council,

served as a primary grant funding source for U.S. based research and work associated with academic

libraries and by extension, library preservation. It was really the only funding

agency that was funding any preservation activity during the 60s and into the 70s

until the mid 70s when the. Than any age started funding preservation activities

established in 1956 with $5 million from the Ford Foundation. The council defined

it as its principal objective, quote, to aid in the solution of library problems,

to conduct research and develop and demonstrate new techniques and methods and disseminate

through any means the results there of Verner. Clapp served as the

council’s first president from 1956 to nineteen sixty seven.

He was a likely choice for the job. A well-connected research library veteran who held the position

of Chief Assistant Librarian of Congress from 1947 to 1956.

He also served as acting librarian of Congress in the early 50s. And due to his position at the

at the library, the library, Congress. He worked actively with the research library community, which allowed

him to keep his finger on the pulse of library issues. In particular,

his experience at the library, Congress and broad knowledge of the field drove drove him to pursue solutions to the

postwar concerns of libraries. In particular,

he was really interested in this issue of networked libraries, really weren’t

talking to each other that much. They weren’t cooperating. They didn’t have networked catalogs

like we have today. None of that existed. We’re still dealing with cards. And,

you know, if you needed to find something in a library, you had to consult a paper resource and

call people up. Well, Clapp sought solutions

that would enable libraries to better serve the needs of their readers. And he claimed,

quote, the aims of scholarship, good government, good citizenship and the good life.

He was described it as an opinion leader and change agent in many of his colleagues, lauded him

as brilliant, as a brilliant visionary. He was commended in nineteen sixty sixty seven

by the Association of Research Libraries as librarians library and just as a touchstone. In

the late 60s, there were about 70 members of the Association of Research Libraries. These were the big

heavy hitter research libraries in the nation. Clapp, however, was a likely

candidate for the presidency for more reasons than his sheer knowledge of library matters. Clapp

And by extension, the council can be understood as part and parcel of the US’s Cold War nation building during

this period beginning in the late forties. The Federal Government’s Cold War era loyalty program,

which became harsh under President Eisenhower, impacted the Library of Congress, which

of course is a federal entity. Luther Evans, Library of Congress in 48 and

instigated investigations of library Congress employees. That spring, he put Clapp in charge

of the libraries, what they called loyalty program. By August to 48,

clampetts suspended several employees. And by 1950, as a result of the massive

purge of homosexuals and what were termed sex perverts from the federal government. Between 10

and fifteen LC employees lost their jobs on his watch. While

there’s no evidence that Clark was particularly enthralled with his assignment, he carried it out.

And while it came to building a progressive system of use, U.S. research, libraries, claps, interests

were synonymous with what? Historian and journalist. Stoner

Saunders calls soft linkages and collusions that advance the aims

of the US as it countered communism with American cultural values. Prominent East

Coast elites who headed foundations, served on boards of directors, taught in Ivy League institutions

and obtained funding from foundations such as the Ford Foundation, often ran in the same circles.

The cozy social informal relationships between these privileges privileged individuals

supported claims that their powerful positions and actions advance the cultural propaganda

function of the CIA. Clarke himself was a CIA consultant from around 1949

until sometime in the 50s. He held top secret clearance and was tasked,

quote, scary that this is actually in writing to maintain liaison

on mutual library matters as well as monitor CIA financed Library of Congress activity.

So I’d argue that Clapp and by extension the council can be really understood as part and parcel

of the US’s Cold War nation building. The US through the CIA committed

huge sums of money to cultural propaganda programs in Western Europe. Congress for Cultural

Freedom, run by the CIA from 1950 to 1967, operated with

dozens of staff in 35 countries and with ties to American America’s Ivy

League institutions, including their libraries and the nation.

Nations also the most privileged philanthropic work organizations in the forward.

There’s been a lot written about the Ford Foundation’s link with the Congress on cultural

freedom in the CIA. I’m not saying

that people thought they were doing espionage. They thought they were doing the right thing

at this time. And so it’s you know, I want to repeat that I’m not gonna make any villains here.

These were humans trying to make decisions at a certain moment in time. And it’s easy for us to look back

and impose hindsight 20/20 on these people. But

I do. What I’m trying to do is say that, you know, because of who these people were

in the time they lived in, it really affected how preservation progressed or didn’t progress at this

moment in time. So the mission you know, the mission of the

Congress on culture, we probably all we’re aware of this was to move the intelligentsia,

those associated with artistic, social and political development of their countries away from Marxism and communism

and towards a view more in line with that of the US.

So, Wolf, step forward here. Klapper claim that Beros investigations revealed,

quote, and this is what Clapp put out there, quote, Few of the books printed in the first

half of this century can be expected to be of much use by its end.

Well, at the time, there were some who questioned Beros true understanding of paper chemistry. He didn’t have a degree

in paper chemistry, and his work definitely lacked scientific

sophistication. And I think even clap question quite a bit. clep in

a later in his life collapse had to comment on how much

he had to edit Beros work so

that these findings triggered this clanging alarm across research

libraries. Because remmeber Clapp is the man in his ARRL buddies or he’s the librarians

librarian and they’re listening to him. And that’s how we

got into this in part. In one part how the focus

really got diverted into these perceived huge issues. I’m not

saying they weren’t there, but they they didn’t they weren’t as large as they were purported to be.

OK, so in 1963, clap fund

the eral to study the need for a coordinated national program to preserve

deteriorating research library collections. The resulting report, authored by Gordon

Williams, who was then director of the Center for Research Libraries, opened with language reminiscent

of a nuclear fallout, warning, quote, the imminent danger of losing much of the information

that society has gained because of the cheerier creation of paper on which this has been recorded

has created a major problem of national concern. It is obvious that the loss

of what has actually to be called been called Mann’s memory must be prevented.

The bold language was meant to capture high level funding, though we shouldn’t doubt for a minute

that the air rail didn’t believe that this was really a serious problem. When it is

tell you the chief leaders in the Eiril course were the top five recent

highest volume research libraries. So you’re talking about Columbia. New York Public

Library, Harvard, Yale, where the four biggest heavy

hitters in the group and library Congress was there. They

didn’t have air conditioning. They had old old collections in Yale’s main

stacks. Sterling didn’t get air conditioned far too far into the 90s. So they also

set recentered in many industrial environments in New York and in

New Haven. And so the pollutants and the outdoor fluctuations in temperature

and humidity vastly hastened the embitterment of their collections.

You know, if you look at our collections here in the main library, we did a

study of those collections back in the early 90s. And at a stretch, a big

stretch, 18 percent would have been considered in brindled. And they weren’t unbridled. Most

of them to the point where you’d actually take them off the shelves and not use them. They were still usable,

but these guys were running the show. So broad, sweeping

actions to preserve these brutal texts. When the SEDIQ paper engendered gendered science based management solutions

fitting for these Cold War times, planners analyze the problems envisioned a system

that required the establishment of this federally supported central agency

in this process. You know, they really overlooked bindings,

color advertisments, varying annotations in books, in the book form itself.

And I’m going to tell you, when I was in school at Columbia in nineteen eighty seven

and one of my jobs in the Columbia Preservation Department was to cut off the spines

of French literary volumes so that they could be microfilmed just

quickly. Page turning. There were so many illustrations in color in

in the things that literally got tossed out. The back door in black and white microfilm was what

was being used because color microfilm is not as long lasting. Right.

So there was a lot of damage done.

But, you know, this is very Cold War stuff, the scare of losing a large body of the nation’s research

holdings. It originated from that same doomsday or doomsday library mindset.

Library planning mindset that aim to ensure the survival of the US in the event of a nuclear battle with the Soviet

Union. So preparing for and surviving nuclear war was a

topic topic that permeated U.S. culture throughout the 50s and 60s. And it determined

how U.S. government, museums, libraries and private companies would protect informational

and cultural assets which were considered and rightly so vital to post-nuclear

survival. I mean, you know, it really thought that the government thought we’d all survive

elaborate systems that except they built bomb shelters for themselves, really secure once

elaborate systems of duplication, dispersal and vaulting were tested by the federal

government. And if you’ll know that and develop to protect the nation’s informational and cultural records.

I mean, there were met lots and lots of attention. You know, World War 2 still was lingering in

the mindset, right, where our major museums moved all

their collections off offsite at various times to do avoid being

bombed. You know, it’s again, to be clear,

I don’t see any villains here. It’s just there are some people who were just informed in a certain

way.

So turning to microfilm solved a lot of problems. A new miniaturised copy of a text easily stored

and easily shared in library stack space was free because one of the other

things that the librarians were worrying about was their burgeoning collections. And here

they were sitting in libraries that may not have built, been built, had been built decades

before in some cases. And they just were running out of space.

Did you know this? Believe it or not, the government tested microfilm out in the desert in the 1950s

to figure out if it would survive a nuclear blast. And it

did.

Is it time? Okay. Sorry. Okay. So you can see what the story is doing.

There are all directors who are really very focused on on on this issue and not

focused on the kinds of nuanced and multifaceted

programs that conservators could help develop in these institutions.

So it became clear to air out into the sort of mid 1970s

that they needed more more librarians to.

They started. This new career called preservation administration, which

is what I got my degree in, and they thought those people got master’s in library science,

right? So they were on par with librarians and institutions and it

carried a certain amount of weight conservators. However, you know, according

to the the ARRL directors in their reports, they continued to see them as technicians

and they called them technicians. Verner Clapp in 1972 called them repair repairmen.

And so that lingered for a long time in the minds of of Eiril

directors and including in the Funder’s like Clapp,

who could fund this at any age, did really step in in the 1970s, as

did the Mellon Foundation towards the end of the 70s. And it began to change this narrative.

But so just a taste and I really appreciate your attentiveness

and I’m sorry if I spoke too long. And I’m really excited about your questions.

So thank you.

And a comment by Don Davis. The context of American

Libraries. Thank you, Ellen, for that remarkable lecture.

I don’t think anyone else has ever worked on the history of this conservation field as you have.

So it’s a long way from the MANDERY when you used to send books from the library

to the mending room to get the Scotch tape on the torn pages

and maybe reinforce the binding a little bit.

Roger asked me to talk a little bit about the the cultural significance

of libraries in American life. Some might be a little more abroad

and related to the public library. A little more

libraries or collections of recorded knowledge are

the collective memory of the human race,

the story of libraries as the saga of what our

predecessors thought was important, important enough to write down

and to preserve in order to inform or enlighten

future readers. Now, of course, we’re talking all the way from the cave

paintings to the computer and beyond. So it’s a wide view

of the record of the cultural legacy is primarily in the in the

words and the graphics preserved from previous generations.

Archival and library collections enable us to understand our monuments

and artifacts, their meaning and the context

in which they came to be. American libraries

emerged in the 17th century in the forums of private

collegiate and parochial collections. These

libraries followed models in Britain

and Europe. The Library Company of

Philadelphia, now an independent research laboratory, is

in our early American example of an independent social

library. And it’s from such

voluntary libraries that sprang the

public library movement of the mid 19th century

social library. Just simply one not sponsored by a organization,

but a group of individuals who decide that they need a collection of materials

to work with the notion that

communities could and would tax themselves to provide for a

free library. Gained momentum in the latter part of the

women’s clubs drew their

municipal leaders around the turn of the 20th century, petitioned

Andrew Carnegie to provide buildings

while they agreed to accept responsibility to give up, to provide books,

staff and development, the public library movement received

a boost that continues to this day. The more than

sixteen hundred Carnegie buildings in more than

fourteen hundred communities in this country

still evoke warm memories. And not only

those with Norman Rockwell nostalgia

and remember the New York of the public library, the Grand Fifth

Avenue building, a research library of renown, was also

a Carnegie project. While the library profession

often justifies itself in terms of

providing equal opportunity, opportunity for all and the

essential conditions for a democracy to flourish,

there is ample evidence of the indisputable fact that

Americans just love their public libraries.

According to my long term, my longtime

colleague, when Wiggen, who has addressed this seminar a couple of times,

the Pew Research Center’s study from half

a dozen years ago indicates that in the previous decade,

in their words, every other major institution government,

churches, banks, corporations has

fallen in public esteem. Except for libraries,

the military and the first responders. Unquote,

although in the 1980s, many evangelists of information technology

predicted the demise of the public libraries. By the turn

of this century, as of two thousand

fifteen, the numbers have not dropped, but

increased to more than 17000 across the country.

More, I’m told, than McDonald’s franchises.

To our great delight, these libraries receiving eighty five percent

of their funding from local sources have adapted to new technologies,

of course, to provide for all, but especially for

the needs of the marginalized in our society, for whom the library

is the primary, if not the only connection

to the rest of the world. One could go on, and I shall not.

But one Forbes journalist reported in 2013

that they have services provided to the 1.5 billion

annual library visitors month and expenditure of and I quote,

just forty two dollars per citizen

each year to maintain a bargain. I think so.

The immense and long lasting goodwill of Americans toward their public

libraries that often began as children,

but continued into young adult

young folks, needy adults and the curious seniors, or maybe

just people who cannot afford to buy all the books they want to read.

This leaves in a very robust legacy. Libraries of all

kinds and with various functions benefit from these

early positive experiences. Research libraries

among them. And that was what we heard about just now.

Thanks for the update.