Chapter I

The Setting of the Problem of Reproducing Research Materials

Word count: 1200

∣📄 p.1 Research in the social sciences and humanities is unlike research in the natural sciences in that it uses written texts as its principal material. The first duty of scholarship is to protect and preserve original writings, the loss of which would be irretrievable. Except in the case of records committed to perishable paper, this service does not call for the reproduction of the texts. But great importance must also be attached to those mechanical impediments which hinder a scholar whenever he is compelled to alter his plans or suspend his work because he can neither go to the material he needs nor have the material brought to him. Unless a given body of research material is reproduced in so many copies and distributed in so many places that it is accessable to all the scholars who wish to use it, the mechanical impediment to the use of that body of material has not been wholly removed.

In the days when the classics and the works of the Fathers constituted the principal body of research material, a scholar was not unlikely to have the core of his research material in his own private library. As the scope of the disciplines expanded and the stock of printed matter accumulated, increasing dependence was placed on the college or university libraries. A generation of great librarians solved the problems of cataloguing and administering these libraries. Now, as the tonnage of needed material continues to increase, the ordinary college library becomes as inadequate as the private library, and the prospect appears that nothing less than the whole system of research libraries, cooperating with each other and allocating responsibilities among themselves, will be able to supply the research scholar’s needs. The Association of Research Libraries was formed in April, 1932, to grapple with this problem, and the American ∥ Library Association Committee on Bibliography has long been working upon it.¹

In dealing with the problem of research materials, three interests are to be distinguished: those of the scholar as a producer, of the scholar as a consumer, and of the library as a custodian. The scholar as a producer wants to see his manuscript set up in type, printed on good paper, bound in buckram, and distributed in as large an edition as possible. Although “book form” is an arbitrary and mechanical criterion of scholarly value, it is given weight in academic circles. The consumer interest is that of the man who is using a library. All the documents of which he makes use are for him “materials for research.” He does not care whether they are printed or typewritten or in manuscript form, whether durable or perishable, whether original or photostat, so long as they are legible. Whether the edition is large or small, whether the library buys, begs, or borrows the material makes no difference to him so long as he can have it in hand when he wants it. The custodian’s interest has to do with the demands of future generations of scholars. The growth of each library must be so directed that its present acquisitions dovetail with past and future acquisitions. The custodian must also undertake to gather items for which there is no present demand on the part of the “consumer”; he may seek especially to care for the unique things which are nowhere else collected and preserved. That these interests may be difficult to reconcile with each other is illustrated both in the production and in the distribution of material.

In the production of books the line of technical development has been in the direction of lower costs for larger editions. Rotary presses and wood-pulp paper, as well as the sales and promotion policies ∣📄 p.2 of publishers, emphasize the importance of securing a wide market. But scholarship, with its tendency to increased specialization, has been constantly diminishing the number of probable users of any given scholarly publication. Publishers’ requirements are met with impermanent papers, while the custodians’ interests call for maximum permanence.

In the distribution of books, that is to say, in the formulating of library acquisition policies, the consumer and custodian interests clash. The graduate schools are feeding into the university and college system a highly trained personnel, expected to pursue research work along with teaching. To secure the maximum of research effort from this teaching personnel, the libraries should be so equipped that any scholar can pick up his work and go on with it wherever he may happen to be teaching. In the attempt to meet the need, library funds are turned this way and that, regardless of long-term policies, to supply the research requirements of the man who happens to be on the ground. But this interferes with the distribution of field among libraries, which is necessary if the total resources of scholarship are to be used most efficiently in collecting and preserving materials.

An inquiry into the techniques of reproducing research materials is called for at the present time because there are coming to light new processes and devices which, taken in their entirety, promise to have an impact on the intellectual world comparable with that of the invention of printing. The typewriter and the photo∥ stat were the precursors of the array of new devices, among which the planograph, or photo-offset, and the miniature film copy have the most interesting possible applications. The photo-offset process now controls the bringing back into print of old books, pamphlets, and journals. A few more inventions along the present line of technological development may result in rendering “reprinting” a kind of simple addition to the functions of a library, as photostating has come to be. The use of miniature film copies is in its very infancy, but progress along its line of development would tend to bring the cost of making a unique copy of a book lower than the normal original purchase price, lower perhaps than the cost of mailing and returning an inter-library loan—a situation with revolutionary implications. Book and journals publishing, now taken for granted as the sole channels for the flow of an intellectual product, may be challenged by the consequences of these technological changes. Perhaps the time may come when the internal documents of scholarship will circulate like the internal documents of a great business enterprise, with the journal and the book appearing in their present volume as vehicles of communication, but supplemented by innumerable memoranda drawn up and multiplied by inexpensive office duplicating processes. Such possibilities lie in the realm of dream and prophecy. For the present there is required only an attentive watching of the new processes and an effort to compare them, fitting each one into its most appropriate place.

Notes