life, and my back hurts from lifting so many volumes of the New York Tribune. But the papers themselves are in such great shape, despite their sometimes rough treatment, that it's a thrill to have them and to see them being used.
Q: You write in Double Fold that "certain purificationally destructive transformations of old things into new things seem to excite people." This implies that people are excited by destruction as well as by creation. Why do you think people are excited by, so to speak, clean slates?
Baker: I once had a neighbor who cut down a tree on his front lawn. I asked him why. "It was dirty," he said. There are always going to be people who like paving things over, cleaning things up, getting rid of junk, neatening the edges - who aren't susceptible to the charms of age or heterogeneity. Urban renewal wouldn't have had the long run it had if nobody was excited by starting fresh.
If you have a floor full of shelves of old newsprint, and you can replace it with new cardboard boxes full of fresh scrolls of microfilm, and all the boxes are exactly the same size, the temptation - if you are a neatener-upper - may be almost irresistible, even when what is on the scrolls of plastic is not a good copy of what was on the pages, and even when it costs you millions of dollars to buy the scrolls of plastic. Same goes for a rack of electronic file-servers. Tidy people have an important place in libraries, of course - it's just that the tidying instinct can't be allowed to run amok.
Q: Is it possible to determine whether a technology truly is an improvement before people actually start to use it? What should the people who make things like microfilm or bio-engineered food or Web search engines ask themselves before they do it? Should they bother at all?
Baker: It isn't possible to predict the way things will go wrong. But if early reports of problems begin to come in, don't actively suppress them - don't pump up the propaganda campaigns in order to convince people that those who are objecting to microfilm (say) suffer from some irrational resistance to technology. If thoughtful people are objecting, listen to what they have to say. I'm not fussing about Web search engines, incidentally. I think they're miracles of speed and coverage that feel to us the way the big newspapers felt a hundred years ago - e.g., in the size and efficiency of their fishing nets and in the strange catches that sometimes surface.
Q: You of course have a complex relationship with technology. This interview, for example, is being conducted by e-mail. Some of your critics, nonetheless, will accuse you of "Luddism." How do you as a consumer of technology decide what is harmful and what is not?
Baker: In the case of digital copies of old books, the technology is not intrinsically harmful. Take a look at www.octavo.com - they take lovely page-by-page pictures of antiquarian books without doing anything more harmful than turning their pages. The harm comes when you decide that it's OK to "disbind" a scarce book - cut it out of its binding - in order to get its pages to lie flat on a scanner, and when you decide that the digital pictures you have just made can permissibly substitute for the reality that was safely (and inexpensively) on the shelf. That's the destructive approach that projects like Making of America and the Mellon Foundation's JSTOR have taken.
Keeping things is not expensive. It costs less than five dollars a book to build remote storage for a book collection; it costs over a hundred dollars a book to microfilm or scan it, more if you want color and a searchable OCR text, and we mustn't forget the hardware
