Double Fold
by Nicholson Baker, Nicholsen Baker, N. Baker, Nicolson Baker · first published 2001
40% recommend60% neutral
"Since the 1950s, our country's libraries have followed a policy of "destroying to preserve": They have methodically dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers, cut up hundreds of thousands of so-called brittle books, and replaced them with microfilmed copies - copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age. Half a century on, the results on this policy are jarringly apparent: There are no longer any complete editions remaining of most of America's great newspapers. The loss to historians and fu
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…many books are "lost" because of some scanning fault Scanning processes are getting better and better, so I also think this is a diminishing problem. Nicholson Baker wrote a fascinating book called Double Fold in which he pointed out that paper books are typically much more durable than many people think¹, and that digitization and imaging projects have significant drawbacks and limitations. Librarians were…
on “A Penny for Your Books (2015)” ↗Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker, is a remarkable discussion of what's lost when libraries destroy bound newspapers when they are "replaced" by microfilm. https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gate...
on “When will librarians start to throw offline literature away?” ↗…destroy huge parts of their collections with little recourse once microfiche/film proved to not live up to its marketing claims or in cases where it was poorly implemented. I recommend Nicholson Baker’s “Double Fold” for a good account of all of this.
on “What happened to Google's effort to scan university library books? (2017)” ↗Read Double Fold. It will make you hate librarians.
on “Library of Congress Digitization Strategy: 2023-2027” ↗…many books were printed on acid-free paper, and these are likely to survive for centuries, even with occasional use. The observations about paper's longevity in, for instance, Nicholson Baker's polemical Double Fold, tallies well with my experience as the son of a bookdealer. My father routinely sells books that are over a century old to people who fully expect to read them. And I remember visiting an antiquarian…
on “What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?” ↗…American Newspaper Repository [2] a non-profit organisation which Baker founded. In 2004, the collection moved to Duke University. - Baker went on to publish a book of the whole affair in 2001 called Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. The Guardian published an interview with him in 2002 (below) [1] Paper Chase: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/22/museums.re... [2] From an archived…
on “The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free” ↗Nicholson Baker wrote a book presenting a similar hypothesis about the preservation of library books (Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper). A core idea of Baker's book is that librarians and the general public drastically underestimate the longevity of printed paper books, in large part because of their…
on “The Perils of an All-Digital Movie Future” ↗Are you thinking of “Double Fold” by Nicholson Baker?
on “CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized” ↗On that note, "Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker
on “Twibright Optar – OPTical ARchiver – a codec for encoding data on paper” ↗Related-ish thread (on the mass destruction of low-quality library books during the microfiche era): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27325095 ("Book Review: Double Fold")
on “Awful Library Books” ↗Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
on “A dumpster arrived behind my university's library” ↗Interesting story. I didn’t know about that. Looking it up, it appears to be well covered and one book Double Fold discusses it extensively. Thank you for sharing.
on “A dumpster arrived behind my university's library” ↗