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∣📄 p.front ∣📄 p.front pastedown ∣📄p.front flyleaf a \(blank\) ∣📄p.front flyleaf b \(blank\) ∣📄 p.[i] MANUAL ON METHODS
OF
REPRODUCING RESEARCH
MATERIALS

A Survey made for the Joint Committee on Materials for
Research of the Social Science Research Council and
the American Council of Learned Societies

By

ROBERT C. BINKLEY
Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF
Dr. T. R. SCHELLENBERG, Professor Miles HANLEY
Miss Josephine McCarter, Miss Adeline Barry
AND Many Others

EDWARDS BROTHERS LN GC,
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN

1936

∣📄 p.[ii] Copyright 1936, by
The Joint Committee on Materials for Research

Printed IN U.S.A.
Lithoprinted by Edwards Brothers, Inc., Lithoprinters and Publishers
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1936

∣📄 p.iii

FOREWORD

The Joint Committee on Materials for Research had its inception in action taken by the Social Science Research Council at its Hanover conference in August, 1929. At this conference the Council approved a tentative definition of its objective which included the enlargement, improvement, and preservation of materials.” This was elaborated as follows:

“Since scientific progress in all fields is conditioned by the existence of a constantly enlarging body of research materials and by its availability to investigators, one of the primary duties of the Council is to promote such objects and to concern itself with the improvement and preservation of research data. In carrying out these purposes the following courses of action are appropriate:

A. Initiating and participating in plans for making more comparable and more widely serviceable the classifications of social and economic data, for making more precise the significance of the data, and for otherwise improving such records.

B. Helping to lay out a plan for the nation-wide development and coördination of existing archival collections and for the building up of new research collections along special lines at strategic scholarly and geographical centers.

C. Initiating and participating in plans for constructing union finding lists and calendars of the resources of existing research libraries, with particular reference to their social data, so as to make them more available to scholars.

D. Initiating and participating in plans to discover, select, edit, publish, or otherwise reproduce basic data in the social sciences, which are difficult of access to students or likely to perish.

E. Calling to the attention of individuals and of governmental, business, and other institutions and agencies the importance of preserving their records for future analysis and study.

F. Encouraging the adoption and widespread use of those varieties of paper and other materials used in the making of records which promise a maximum durability.

G. Initiating, encouraging, and participating in plans to develop the research uses of historical, industrial, and social museums; and encouraging the building up of new collections with these purposes in mind.”

The American Council of Learned Societies, which is interested primarily in the humanities, including history, had concerned itself for some years with materials for research; and, as the problems of the two Councils in this field are much the same and often involve the same material, it was logical for them to join in setting up a joint committee on materials for research. This committee, after a number of changes in personnel, consists at present of the following members:

∣📄 p.iv

• Robert C. Binkley, Western Reserve University, Chairman
• T. R. Schellenberg, National Archives, Secretary
• Laurence V. Coleman, American Association of Museums
• Norman S. B. Gras, Harvard University
• H. M. Lydenberg, New York Public Library
• Arthur H. Quinn, University of Pennsylvania
• Verne E. Chatelain, National Park Service

In the course of its first two meetings in 1930, the committee set on foot three surveys. A “Survey of Activities of American Agencies in Relation to Materials for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities” was compiled by Franklin F. Holbrook, under the direction of Professor Solon J. Buck, and published in a small edition in the spring of 1932. A study of the categories of research material which ought to be collected and preserved was undertaken by a subcommittee headed by Professor Gras. The task of making a survey of methods of reproducing research materials was assigned to Robert C. Binkley, then secretary of the committee. A tentative edition of this survey was issued in December, 1931, and circulated for corrections and additions, which have been incorporated in the present edition.

∣📄 p.v

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The collaboration of scholars, technicians, and business men in the preparation of this manual has been generous and long- continued. The list of names carried in the index is in itself a list of helpful collaborators to whom acknowledgment is due. If the list were to be extended to all who have given sympathetic aid, it would cover pages.

The correspondence covering the matters brought together in this book has been carried on for six years. The conclusions here set forth have been slowly crystallized in the presence of constantly changing cost levels and constantly improved mechanical equipment. Much of the book that deals with tabulations of cost and with descriptions of equipment will undoubtedly be outdated in the near future; some of it is perhaps already out of date at the moment of going to press.

It is hoped, however, that the basic thought of the book will still stand: namely, that the great variety of devices which modern technology offers to modern scholarship should be kept under constant scrutiny, both from the standpoint of utility and of comparative cost.

Robert C. Binkley

Western Reserve University
April 14, 1936

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

∣📄 p.xi

LIST OF TABLES

∣📄 p.xiii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS