durable, adj. - capable of lasting or continuing in existence
Who isn’t talking about digitization and the projected demise of the word on paper? My reading load and podcast schedule has been full of it lately, with some surprising arguments for paper as technology. On the Media recently had a whole program dedicated to the book, and one of the featured speakers was William Powers, media critic for the National Journal. He posits that paper itself is a part of the substance of what is being transmitted:
What I basically argue in my essay is that paper isn’t just a container for content. It actually becomes part of the content. It affects the content because of the way it interacts with the brain. It’s a technology, although we don’t usually think of it as a technology.
The essay he refers to above is called “Hamlet’s Blackberry,” and while on the longer side, is a thoughful exploration of the headbutting of these old and new technologies.
And I realize that I might be opening a can of worms that was already put to rest with my current reading, Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, but I’m a bit behind the curve regarding the battles and controversies in the conservation world. Newspapers don’t crumble into dust due to their own acidic nature? But…but…. I was always taught that they were! Something curious that I hadn’t considered was Baker’s assertion that much of paper’s degredation occurs early in its life and then basically levels out.
But, the land-war over shelf-space issue is really at the heart of the issue, as Richard Cox from University of Pittsburgh writes. Most bibliophiles have at least some hoarding tendencies, and so Baker’s arguement is seductive: “let’s save everything!” Maybe that will occur once our society turns its funding to the library-industrial complex (still working on that), but until then, hard selection choices will continue to be made.
We see all kinds of crazy “treatments” that have previously been sanctioned as “good preservation.” While Baker may have simplified the complexities of maintaining certain types of collections, I think his observations lead us back to the Middle Path, with its “can’t we all just get along?” mantra.
Digitization, preservation, conservation, paper, digital media… why do these conversations tend toward mutually exclusive tones? Cooperation, imagination and initiative!
After more poking around, it looks like Baker’s American Newspaper Repository collection has found permanent housing at Duke University.
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That whole “newspapers crumble into dust” issue seems to degrade to one side declaring “no it doesn’t” and the other side responding “yes it does”. Just last week in my class I was talking about the structure and deterioration of print materials and of course we talked about acidic paper and newspaper. And then I took out a newspaper from 1881 which is in perfectly fine condition. According to the chemistry of acidic paper, a 127 year old newspaper is not supposed to be in perfectly good condition. I don’t deny the challenge of acidic paper and I’ve handled plenty of brittle, crumbly newspapers, but the chemistry is obviously more complicated than many people seem willing to acknowledge.