Education: Book on a Card?

By 1938, Yale’s library had grown to 2,748,000 volumes. They filled 80 miles of shelves, were card-catalogued in 10,000 drawers, required 200 attendants. This increase was typical of the larger U.S. university libraries, which for more than a century have roughly doubled the number of their volumes every 16 years. If Yale’s collection continues to multiply at this pace, within another century it will contain 200,000,000 volumes, requiring 6,000 miles of shelves, eight acres of catalogue files. 6.000 cataloguers.

This geometric bogey was raised last week by Connecticut Wesleyan’s Librarian Fremont Rider in The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library (Hadham Press, $4.00). But Librarian Rider is not overly alarmed. He thinks the solution is already at hand, in microprint.

Microfilm, used for Vmail, is increasingly popular in research libraries—thus far chiefly for filing newspapers. Photographed on 35-mm. film, ten complete issues of the New York Times (averaging 800 pages) can be recorded on a single 100-ft. reel. Placed in a reading machine operated by hand crank, the film is projected on a screen, enlarged to 18 in. by 18 in. Heads of university presses, tired of spending $1,000 to $4,000 to publish scholarly books which may never be read by more than a hundred or so other scholars, are talking of publishing more & more whole books on microfilm.

Librarian Rider thinks their scheme is already obsolete. For microfilms must be boxed, catalogued and stored like books. Preservation is also a problem: film wears out far faster than paper.

Microprint, in Librarian Rider’s opinion, is a better scientific substitute for oldtime methods of scratching the Lord’s Prayer on a pinhead. As employed commercially by Manhattan’s Readex Microprint Corp., it reduces the ordinary book page to 1/400th of its original size, prints these pages in blocks of one hundred on a 6 in. by 9 in. card. For reading, the card is inserted in a “reflectoscope” which enlarges each microprinted page to 9 in. by 12 inches. Only one page at a time appears in the reader’s vision, and a mechanical finder enables him to turn quickly to the page he wants.

Readex is now microprinting for sale to libraries 5,000 British and U.S. plays, and the complete record of British “Sessional Papers” (Government documents) from 1800 to 1900. Readex plans to sell its set of plays for $2,500—an average of 50¢ per “volume.” The “reflectoscope” costs $225.

Librarian Rider, a hard man to satisfy, objects to current Readex practice because the cards, like microfilm, must be boxed and stored. He would carry the process one step further, use standard card-catalogue cases, simply microprint each book on the back of its card. There would be no writing out of slips, no waiting for books to be brought from the stacks. An average library file drawer containing 2,300 cards, estimates Rider, would hold as many “books” as 168 ft. of shelves. It is already possible, he reports, to microprint 250 book pages on one side of a 3 in. by 5 in. card. He asserts that this number can soon be doubled.

A future five-foot shelf, it appears, may be no bulkier than a pack of playing cards.