Deterioration of Library Collections Today

Abstract

In discussing the deterioration of library collections today, it would be possible to deal with the topic very briefly-not quite as briefly as with the subject of snakes in Ireland, but in a single sentence. This would read, Everything in library collections is deteriorating today, was deteriorating yesterday, and will continue to deteriorate tomorrow although we ought to retard the process. Enough is known to justify this statement; it is when details are examined and countermeasures are considered that complications arise and the limitations of our knowledge become evident. It is hardly easier to generalize about the deterioration of books than about the aging of human beings. Beginning as identical twins, two copies of the same book may deteriorate at very different rates as the result of use and of storage conditions, which vary, even within the stacks of a single library, from one shelf to another. Life expectancies of different kinds of paper range from a very few years to centuries, and paper, of course, is not the only substance with which we are concerned. The conference will also deal with bindings and with photographic films; perhaps the conference program should also have provided for consideration of magnetic tapes and other things on which increasing stores of information will be recorded as the computer extends its empire. There are those who wonder why we worry about the deterioration of something as obsolete as the book. This line of thought, however, would get us into tomorrow before we have dealt with today, much less with yesterday. It seems to me that we must begin with a glance at least toward the past; if some familiarity with history were not essential to an understanding of the present, perhaps we would be foolish to deplore or resist the deterioration of our library collections. Our problem has a long history. It occurs to me that the most serious mistake in that long history may have been made at an early date when knowledge began to be recorded on substances more pliable and more perishable than the baked clay tablet, which will not tear, will not burn, and will not turn into a pulpy mess when it is soaked in water. Have not library collections been highly perishable ever since? Have we not repeatedly sacrificed permanence for convenience and economy? Vellum, to be sure, was more durable in many respects than papyrus, but vellum, after a few centuries, was superseded by a Chinese invention, paper. We were warned as early as the twelfth century, when the emperor of the Occident, Frederick I, Barbarossa, prohibited the use of paper in deeds and charters because he feared it was too perishable [11]. The account of Paper Deterioration-An Old Story by Lee E. Grove [2], which was published five years ago, begins with a fifteenth-century Benedictine abbot, Johann Tritheim, who believed that vellum would last for a millennium but had his doubts about paper. I wish only to give a few names,