Astral Codex Ten

Library of Congress

4 min read

Library of Congress

Article

Library of Congress is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 30, 2021 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “50% of all received microfilms that were rejected by the Library of Congress in the mid-1970s”; “Verner Clapp, the number-two person in the Library of Congress during the 1950s”; “Verner Clapp at the Library of Congress”. It most often appears alongside 1893, 1970s, 1970s radicals.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: July 14, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
The “decent job” part turns out to be really important. Because you need a machine to read them, microfilms are harder to casually inspect for quality, which gave them the nickname “the invisible product.” Baker enjoys listing examples of lazy operators skipping pages and producing incomplete films, but the really big issue is technical. If you aren’t very careful when developing the microfilm, “residual hypo” – image-processing chemicals that weren’t rinsed away during processing – will damage the microfilm and blur the text, often beyond the point of legibility. Put all this together and you get to the number of 50% of all received microfilms that were rejected by the Library of Congress in the mid-1970s. The problem? Over half of these rejected microfilms weren’t returned to the vendor, but were accepted into the Library’s collection despite their faults, such was the hurry to modernize.
Lastly, microfilms themselves don’t age very well. Just like paper, there are different kinds of plastics being used for microfilm (as well as microfiche, which is a lower-resolution version of microfilm, and similar-but-abandoned technologies such as Microcards), and Baker lists the ways in which each of them is sensitive to damage. The main form of damage is fading due to prolonged light exposure, but even worse is what can happen if all that focused light on a small strip of film causes the temperature to increase too much, which can lead to the film basically getting blotted out. Sometimes, all of this can lead to ironic consequences, such as when Baker tried to consult the papers of Verner Clapp, the number-two person in the Library of Congress during the 1950s and one of the most passionate supporters of microfilm.
It didn’t require a huge leap of logic, then, for Rider to propose that Microcards should be made by cutting up the books in question before filming them, since there won’t be a need for these books afterwards. Baker follows Rider’s intellectual genealogy through Verner Clapp at the Library of Congress, who wrote a eulogy to Rider in a 1964 library science textbook, and through the network of Clapp’s own disciples. One of Clapp’s protégés, John H. Ottemiller, wrote pointedly in the 1960s that the library of the future has a “need for putting greater emphasis on the discarding of materials rather than their storage.”
Contra The Social Model Of Disability
July 14, 2023 · Original source
And there are some things Society will never be able to accommodate. My grandmother was blind for the last 30 years of her life. Society did a great job accommodating her - special kudos to the Library of Congress, which sends all blind people free audiobooks. Still, she could never see a sunset, or a rainbow, or a beautiful artwork. She didn’t want some kind of social revolution. She just wished she could see again.