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In our rush to digitize the past, we may be destroying vast swathes of graphic-design
history.
By Dan Nadel
The Metropolis Observed
November 2002
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Corbis Bettmann is preserving its photo archive in an underground
facility in Iron Mountain, PA (above). Digital storage methods can't
capture the charm and interest of ancillary materials like the text that
accompanies this photo (below).
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Henry Wilhelm
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"We have the actual film from a battlefield camera that's
directly captured the light reflected from a dying soldier's eyes,"
says Henry Wilhelm, consultant on long-term preservation to Corbis, the
Bill Gates-owned image archives and digital resource, explaining the
necessity of Corbis's move of the Bettmann archives to an underground facility
in Pennsylvania. For Wilhelm, Ektachrome film shot by United Press
International war correspondents is not only an instrument of information
but a historical artifact and preserver of something as irreplaceable as,
well, the light on a battlefield in Vietnam. That light would vanish
forever were it not for Wilhelm and Corbis's preservation efforts. Other
collections haven't been so lucky.
Corbis--a private for-profit corporation--has raised the hackles of
photo researchers, but has unfairly been given a bad rap. In fact it should
be a model for the institutions whose mandate is preservation. The core
of the Corbis image archives is the Bettmann collection, which grew from
two steamer trunks that Otto Bettmann left Germany with in 1935. Since its
inception the collection has grown to 7.5 million unique images and has
spawned several quirky books, such as The Bettmann Portable Archives,
in which Bettmann arranged images by theme and phrase, producing humorous,
idiosyncratic juxtapositions. But by the early 1990s the materials stored
at Bettmann's Manhattan office were rotting: acetate negatives were
badly decomposed, and photos were curling and yellowing. In the past researchers
could go to the archives and look through prints and negatives under supervision.
For New York-centered media, losing access to the archives is troubling,
but preferable to losing the materials completely in the long term.
Enter Corbis: its 1995 purchase of the Bettmann collection meant that funding
was finally in place for long-term preservation. So in fall and winter
2001-2002, 18 semitrailer truckloads of documents went to a newly constructed
repository in the Iron Mountain storage facility in western Pennsylvania,
which opened last April. All Bettmann properties will be stored there at
subzero temperatures to preserve them for what Wilhelm estimates will be
thousands of years. It is open to the public by appointment. Some 225,000
images are already available online for browsing, and scanning at the Iron
Mountain facility is an ongoing daily activity; if the Web resource doesn't
suffice, any researcher can call Corbis and ask after images and topics.
Once a choice is made, images can be scanned or a trip to the archives can
be arranged to view the original. Contrary to rumors and the funereal symbolism,
Iron Mountain is not the burial of the Bettmann archives but rather a renewed
life. Wilhelm hopes that the standard set by Corbis will "serve as
a living example for other institutions."
Anyone looking to be alarmed would do better to talk to private patent researcher
Randy Rabin, president of PatentArts, who rifles through recycling bins
for lithographed patents by the likes of Thomas Edison. Since October 2001
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has thrown out nearly
50 percent of its examiner collections of patents dating back to the mid-nineteenth
century. Three things are being lost: a filing system, a specialized
drafting technique, and a historical record of invention. And the history
of an entire design medium is being destroyed.
The patent examiner's former classification system contained almost
500 classes of technology, each with hundreds of subdivisions. It allowed
researchers to easily learn the history of a patent and compare it to other
similar designs. "Seldom does an invention come along that is as out
of the blue as the first lightbulb, or electric motor, or laser,"
Rabin says. "Most are incremental improvements that fit in or
between other similar patents. Being able to quickly span a decade or so
of similar work in a matter of an hour provides an inventor a context and
history he can't find anywhere else, and usually results in a better
invention."
Unfortunately the computer system that will replace the paper library functions
much the way a search engine does on the Web. Rabin explains, "You
fish around with some selected words and hope the patent you are seeking
(the one that may mean trouble for your invention) has the same words that
you have chosen to look for it." If a match doesn't come up, a researcher
is out of luck.
Three-quarters of the patents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century contained beautifully lithographed drawings made by artisans that
specialized in patent drafting; now their work is vanishing from public
view forever. Beyond the delicate line quality and light and shade on display
in, for example, Edison's 1893 patent for the Electric Locomotive (a recycling
bin find), some of the patents, like R. S. Kibler's Continuously Variable
Transmission, from 1936, were meticulously colored. The USPTO keeps a complete
set of pristine patent drawings in the very same Iron Mountain facility
as Corbis's collections. But the patent examiner's collection was a working
one. Generations of examiners have added notes, new findings, and thoughts
to the patent sheets, often in handwriting that can be dated by the style
of its scrawl. This enabled each new examiner to see what his past colleagues
thought of the invention, providing an invaluable picture of patent history.
The black-and-white low-resolution scans available online at www.uspto.gov
omit not only those notes (now lost forever) but the sheer beauty of the
line quality, color, depth, and shade of the drawings.
"To save everything would," Rabin says glumly, "take a K-Mart"--about
75,000 square feet--to house the 6.5 million patents, which average 16 pages
each. But he is doing his part via www.edisonsark.org, a Web site that includes
color scans of the patents he has found, thus at least preserving the documents
as they should be seen. For Rabin "the dilemma is how to preserve these
patents and show what's being lost."
Nicholson Baker, author of Vox, The Mezzanine, The Size
of Thoughts, and other books, is in a similar predicament. As detailed
in his recent book, Double Fold, Baker is trying to save more than
a century's worth of newspapers from destruction through his nonprofit
American Newspaper Repository (www.oldpapers.org), a warehouse in New Hampshire
that's open to the public. Out of the millions of daily editions published
over the decades, Baker has in many cases the only extant runs of hundreds
of major metropolitan, small town, and foreign-language immigrant newspapers.
He discovered that because of an unfounded theory that all newsprint would
degenerate into dust, libraries--including the Library of Congress--have
since the middle of last century microfilmed and then destroyed or
auctioned thousands of bound volumes of newspapers. Now only black-and-white
microfilm versions, often badly photographed, are all that's left of
crucial chunks of American graphic and cultural history. More strikingly
for the histories of comic strips, illustration, and graphic design, turn-of-the-century
newspapers frequently had lengthy color sections including comics, fashion,
sheet music, paper toys, and all manner of illustrations. The Yiddish
Forward, like the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune,
is a deep well of rotogravure images, many of pre-WWII village life in Europe.
That doesn't translate into microfilm. Reading it, one can't duplicate
the nonlinear process of scanning columns, headlines, and captions while
holding the newspaper open. Baker believes that the "only way to understand
what a city was like is to read the paper. Because all these problems were
thought about constantly, day after day, cumulatively in a given year. When
people begin to read the paper as it was meant to be read, it will change
the texture of historical writing." Because many of these papers don't
have indexes--including two of the most significant, the New York
Tribune and the New York World--discoveries are just waiting
to be made. Many of O. Henry's first short stories appeared in the
World alongside his own illustrations, and Stephen Crane was a crime
reporter for the New York Tribune.
Baker's book and the founding of the American Newspaper Repository (which
he hopes eventually to give to a major institution) have helped the cause,
but he continues to make unusual finds, such as the only extant complete
run of USA Today from 1992 to 2000. That a graphic-design landmark
so recent and so widely distributed could be so rare highlights the necessity
of Baker's cause. He hopes his example of storage and accessibility will
show that "it's not that hard to do, especially for public institutions
whose job it is to keep what's published."
In her essay "Researching Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk,"
Susan Buck-Morss describes her encounter with Benjamin's recently rediscovered
notes, incidental writings, and other ephemera related to his incomplete
masterpiece, Passagen-Werk. The papers were festooned with traces
of the author's elaborate color-coded filing systems, doodles, and
notes to himself. All of that at the time of her research was also being
lost to microfiche and then stowed away. Feeling the loss acutely,
Buck-Morss notes that "the fascination of this new find was not
the information it contained... Rather, it was [its] unintentional inclusion
of traces from Benjamin's life, the day's residue that entered into his
work in a material sense."
For her--as for Wilhelm, Rabin, and Baker--it's the essence of the life
lived that dwells within these artifacts. When we destroy it, what potential
clues to be followed by unknown sleuths are vanishing? What is insignificant
now may be monumentally important in 50 years. The loss of patents, newspapers,
and images of all kinds amounts to a loss not only of vast swathes of graphic
history but of the records of our collective cultural life. We should be
grateful that, regardless of the inconvenience, some people are trying to
save it.
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