Microfilm is, Allen Veaner has written, the “invisible product.”29 Librarians file it away unlooked-at, or do a few spot checks, hoping the images it holds are all okay. “Serious defects,”30 writes Veaner, “often do not show up until months or years later (when an angry faculty member or student complains of an illegible or missing page, or when images have faded owing to faulty processing).” For one research project, Shawn Godwin was hired by Old World Wisconsin, a living-history museum, to look at every page of all the newspapers published in Grant County, Wisconsin, between the eighteen-fifties and the nineteen-fifties. Most of the papers were available only on old microfilm; Godwin’s task was to find references in them to a certain small African-American community. Some of film was fine, but some of it was not: “Entire years were improperly microfilmed and virtually illegible,” he wrote me.
There is nothing more frustrating than to be trying to reconstruct a specific event, to know it is in the paper, to have references to an article and then to stare and strain at poor quality microfilm and finally acknowledge that what you are looking for is there in name but lost in substance, gone forever into the maw of time.
Nancy Kraft, a librarian at the State Historical Society of Iowa, estimates that about one third of her library’s reels31 of pre-1960 microfilm of Iowa newspapers (seven thousand reels, 8.4 million pages) “represent files that will have to be refilmed”—and many can’t be refilmed, she says, because there is no original file left to work from.
When the NEH began paying for mass-microfilming projects in the early eighties, they compelled some improvements in standards;32 and microfilm labs such as Preservation Resources and the Northeast Document Conservation Center can do fine work. Nevertheless, serious mistakes still occur. Nicholas Noyes, director of the Maine State Historical Society’s library, told me that in one recent outsourced job the company failed to film an entire year’s worth of newspaper issues. Fortunately his library’s policy is to save its originals: the year isn’t lost forever. Steve Dalton, who moderates the Northeast Document Conservation Center’s popular “School for Scanning” conference, said in 1998 that one of the benefits of microfilming over digital scanning is that microfilmers have had time to learn from their mistakes: “I like to think that after these years and years of experience, we have learned how to do it well.” But he added, “I must also admit there is still a ton of really poor quality microfilm that’s produced — hopefully not here at NEDCC, but it is produced nonetheless.” Dennis Hardin, who runs the microfilming lab at the Indiana Historical Society, told me, “I think there’s a lot of film out there that we wouldn’t put our names on with a ten-foot pole.”
The fading problem is the most serious one, in my own experience. Recently, I tried to read the microfilm of a 1914 issue of Foster’s Weekly Democrat & Dover Enquirer, published in Dover, New Hampshire. There were whole pages on which little more than the headlines was legible. I was able to read:
NORTHAM COLONISTS33
HOLD MEETING
Two Interesting Papers Read
at January Session
And then, below it, there was a column of nothing. No originals of this paper survive, as far as I know: the New Hampshire State Library and the Dover Public Library threw theirs away. The new head librarian in Dover conceded that she’s been frustrated at times, looking up a particular article on her library’s film and finding that “you just can’t read it.” On the other hand, as she pointed out, there’s more space in the library. “It’s so wonderful to have a hundred and fifty years of newspapers in a cabinet,” she said.
CHAPTER 5. The Ace Comb Effect
Setting aside the joys and sorrows of the paperless reading experience, and setting aside microfilm’s inability to do justice to color printing and halftone photographs, and setting aside the technical troubles with deteriorating emulsions and plastic substrates, one may ask a more basic question: Are the words the same? That is, is the microfilm with which the Library of Congress replaced its copy of the World-Telegram, say — whether or not it is adequately photographed or physically durable or experientially equivalent — is it, at the very least, a faithful reproduction of what preservation administrators like to call the “intellectual content” of the paper originals? Does microfilm successfully capture the text of the thing it locally replaces? No, often it doesn’t, because big-city papers published five or ten or more editions (or “replates”) throughout a given day, and most libraries simply bound whichever ones they happened to be sent.
For example, the front page of my bound World-Telegram for February 3, 1934 (photographed by Recordak in the thirties and held in microfilm by the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress) has a big right-hand headline, O’LEARY OUSTED BY LA GUARDIA; MOSES TAKES UP TRI-BORO POST, accompanied by prominent pictures of three men recently fired by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. The microfilm’s big right-hand headline, by contrast, is STRIKERS ARM WITH BLACKJACKS; MAYOR APPOINTS TAXI ARBITRATOR, and the only picture is a tiny one of Emmett Toppino, who planned to run the sixty-yard dash at Madison Square Garden that night. Rudy Vallee’s divorce problems made the front page in my paper edition—“Supreme Court Justice Richard P. Lydon today reinstated Fay Webb Vallee’s suit to restrain her husband, crooning Rudy Vallee, from divorcing her in Mexico”; but in the microfilmed later edition we read instead of the disturbing death of Mrs. Annie Smith, “who rocked too far forward last night and fell into the fire.”
The January 1, 1899, Chicago Tribune provides another instructive example. In the microfilmed copy of the Tribune for that day, a half-inch strip of text is missing from the left margin of the image. The microfilm’s headline reads:
ST HOURS OF
SPANISH RULE
so’s Flag to be Lowered
the Forts and Public
Buildings of Havana
at Noon Today.
The article itself, cabled in by Richard Henry Somebody — his surname is gone — clearly had to do with the end of the Spanish-American War (a war created by newspapers, incidentally, just as Citizen Kane suggests), but the text is too corrupt to follow. There is a nine-frame political cartoon running across the middle of the page entitled “Pen Pictures of the Leading Events of the Week,” but the first box of the cartoon isn’t comprehensible:
ENTLE ART
OISONING
URAGED
AL.
Turning now to the massive Chicago Tribune volume owned by the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State, formerly of Harvard (this one bearing a bookplate that said it was paid for out of the bequest of “Mrs. Anne A. P. Sever, Widow of Col. James Warren Sever, Class of 1817”): everything for January 1, 1899, is legible; Alfonso’s flag, as it happens, was to be lowered at noon. Moreover, the page Harvard kept safe for a hundred years differs substantially in content from the text of the microfilmed copy. One of Harvard’s above-the-fold headliners was a long account of the heroic efforts of Henry Nehf, a druggist and volunteer fireman from Terre Haute, Indiana, whose body had been found in the remains of a burned and collapsed building, his right arm over his head, as if to fend off the ceiling, and his left around the nozzle of a fire hose. When Nehf had disappeared twelve days earlier, he had at first been suspected of starting the fire or otherwise being on a “debauch”; now, he was a hero. Nehf’s watch was stopped at 6:08. “It is not an unreasonable conjecture that the falling débris which stopped the watch caused his death, as the watch was in a vest pocket over his chest, which was crushed in,” wrote the unflinching reporter. Later that day, however, in the edition that was later microfilmed, the article was drastically shortened to make room for coverage of a gas explosion in Hartford City, Indiana. A world that keeps only microfilm for January 1, 1899, will be a world that does not know that Henry Nehf, martyr druggist, owned a watch that stopped suddenly at 6:08.