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L E WORLD S RECORDED KNOWLEDGE IS DIMINISHING. Centmies·
old scientific texts, first editions of important literary works, government records,
personal letters, Civil War muster rolls, glass-plate negatives from the early days of
photography-millions of historical documents are succumbing to mildew, insects,
human handling, the elements, and acidic paper. Some books are in advanced states
of decay, too brittle to be handled at all. Others in better condition-particularly the
rare volumes-lie in the darkness oflibraryvaults, seen only by serious scholars and
forgotten by everyone else. Even when libraries do present such works to the public ,
the books typically sit under glass, with just two pages showing. In either case, from
deterioration or protection, knowledge remains unavailable. J But a burgeoning
worldwide effort by libraries, institutions, and commercial enterprises is attempt-
ing to solve the problem by copying selected documents in digital form, such as TIFF
images and PDF (portable document format) files. Though not intended as replace-
ments for the originals, the digital versions-created with scanners or digital cam-
eras-serve three important purposes: they capture the original documents at a
given moment in time; they help conserve the originals by giving scholars alterna-
tive (and often fully adequate) versions for study; and they can provide worldwide
access on the Web or on CD-ROM to works that would not otherwise be seen .

Like any other extensive project in its not to mention the constant vigilance THE RARE AND THE BEAUTIFUL
early stages, digital preservation still has of archivists. Twelve years ago, it was the individual
a lot of problems to solve. Numerous pan- Then there's the matter of what to preference of John Warnock (CEO of
els, forums, and conferences have not yet preserve. With so many historic books, Adobe Systems) that started a path to-
established any standar s for resolution, manuscripts , and photographs around ward some pioneering work with high-
file format, scanning h dware, or display. the world , how do you choose what to resolution digitization. In 1987, while
Commercial firms, try" g to prove they copy? Today, individual preferences and on vacation in London with his family,
can turn a profit int e archive business, "demonstration projects" (typically gov- Warnock came across an old volume of
don't want to divulge proprietary tech- ernment-funded efforts to test certain Euclid's Elements at an antique dealer.
niques. But perhaps the biggest concern methods) account for most digital preser- After some moments of great admira-
is the inevitable push of technology- vation, though more wide-ranging pro- tion-Warnock is a mathematician by
today's most popular hardware, medium , grams are starting to appear, such as the training-and with some encouragement
or file format might become obsolete in American Memory project at the Library from his wife, he purchased the book. He
another few years. (Who can extract data of Congress (lcweb2.loc.govamhome.html) , didn 't quite know it then , but the biblio-
from reel-to-reel magnetic tapes any- a collection of Americana; and the Valley phile bug had bitten. Warnock has since
more?) Ensuring the migration of digital of the Shadow, a comparison of two com- put together a considerable library of rare
books to the latest format will require munities during the Civil War, as depicted and important books, with an emphasis
vast amounts of disk space to store un- through various documents (Jefferson. on those that had significant impacts
comp ressed files or multiple formats, village.virginia.edu/vshadow2). on world history . He kept his collection
Octavo's growing collection of digitized books
includes a 1754 edition of Louis Renard's
hand-colored engravings of sea creatures from
drawings by Samuel Fa/lours, an artist with pretty much to himself, preferring not
the Dutch East India Company (figure 1); to attract the attention that inevitably
Copernicus's 1543 treatise on the revolutions comes with such purchases. Then, in
of celestial spheres (figures 2.A and 2.B), which 1996, Warnock was invited, as he was
changed the way we saw ourselves in the uni- every year, to speak at t he annual Tech-
figure 1 verse; and Andreas Vesalius's extensive study nology, Entertainment, and Design (TED)
of human anatomy, illustrated by woodcuts conference in Monterey, Calif.-except
from the circle of Titian (figure 3). this time, the organizers wanted some-
thing different. Could he talk about a
hobby? It occurred to Warnock that
he could present a few of his books.
With the volumes in a simple card-
board box next to him on the stage, War-
nock he ld each one up to the audience-
Copernicus's treatise on the revolutions
of celestial spheres, Newton's Opticks,
the Euclid-and spoke briefly of their his-
tories, their significance. Throughout, the
aud ience remained unusually quiet, but
when Warnock finished, he was aston-
ished by the response. Not only did he
receive a stand ing ovation, but several
peop le approached the stage with tears
streaming down their faces. They'd stud-
ied the condensed and modernized ver-
sions of suc h work in textbooks, but
never before had they seen the original
paths to these groundbreaking ideas-
the actual progression of thought.
It was then that Warnock conceived
the idea of sharing his collection in a
more public way. At home, he tinkered
with scanning options and image sizes,
and found that he could produce manage-
able PDF files containing images from a
book. A few years later, Octavo-a com-
pany devoted to the digital presentation
~ '
J •• rt •
of rare and beautiful books-was born.
Led by Patrick Ames, who formerly
headed up Adobe Press {and who'd been
doing his own experiments with digital
books), and supported for now by War-

figure2.A figure 2 .B
FORWARD TO THE PAST
nock, Octavo is essentially a publisher; disdaining bells and whistles, provides from the Federal Theatre project, a De-
the company captures books in PDF for- only a single enhancement to some pression-era effort by the U.S.government
mat on CD-ROM for sale to individuals books: an underlying layer of searchable to employ out-of-work playwrights and
and develops partnerships with libraries, English text, a great boon to scholars. actors (see lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/pictel).
which might display the digital version in Two recent projects, Louis Renard's The papers themselves, which are in vari-
a kiosk next to the original. Octavo (www. 1754 book of hand-painted tropical fish ous states of deterioration, are not beauti-
octavo.com) began by digitizing a 1640 from the Academy of Natural Sciences in ful-in fact, most are simply typed corre-
edition of Shakespeare's poems, Robert Philadelphia and a beautiful 1524 French spondence with scribbled annotations-
Hooke's Micrographia (a 17th-century version of the Book of Hours-a prayer but they contain valuable records from
book of microscopic views), and the book of illuminations created by a callig- a significant period in history. There are ,
Opticks-all from Warnock's collection- raphers' guild-show off the extraordi- quite literally, millions of such documents
and demonstrated impressive results; nary possibilities of such high-resolution around the world. Using a process like
with over a dozen rare volumes complete, surrogates. Zoom in as close as possible, Octavo's to preserve them would be im-
the company now receives severa l re- and the experience of the book is taken practical and unnecessary. Instead, the
quests per week from institutions, in- to the hyperreal. Ames, in fact, envisions task will require Sharpe's round-the-clock
dividuals, and libraries. Ultimately, the the projection of an Octavo edition on the assembly-line approach.
decisions on what to digitize lie with wall of a museum_:'you could walk into In addition, Sharpe is trying to democ-
E.M. Ginger, a book expert and the senior the book;' he says, opening his arms. ratize the digitization of documents by
editor at Octavo. She considers the clarity forming a nonprofit organization called
of the pages and (with an eye toward THE STACKS Adopt A Book (www.adoptabook.org)-
sales) the importance of the work and Louis Sharpe, president of Picture Ele- a consortium of libraries on a network
its potential value among scho lars. ments, a manufacturer of high-speed sharing digitized books, which are spon-
Octavo's approach to books is reveren- scanning hardware often used by banks sored (adopted) by institutions or indi-
tial and purist. Ames says the intent is to copy checks, takes a different approach viduals. Though it may sound blasphe-
to capture "all the personality of the book, to preservation. Instead of concentrating mous to the serious book collector,
as is, under certain lighting conditions:· on rare books at high resolutions, Sharpe Sharpe envisions one copy of an impor-
A specially designed digital camera, wants to scan "the stacks;· a reference tant book (one that exists in several cop-
mounted a few feet above a custom cradle to the general shelves in a library. His idea ies) being sacrificed as a "leaf master";
that holds the book, captures two pages is to use automated high-speed scanners unbound, it would flow, page by page,
at a time and an enormous amount of at fairly low cost to digitize large numbers into a high-speed sheet-fed scanner.
data-up to 8,000 by 10,000 pixels, pro- of manuscripts (and even books) that Sharpe believes such work, producing
ducing on average 140 megabytes for each may be less highly valued but neverthe- high-quality JPEG files, would cost only
shot. A single, uncompressed book might less contain important information. $100 per book, and only $30 for manu-
end up at 20 gigabytes or more. The re- An example is the collection of papers scripts that are already unbound.
sulting images contain all of the minute
details of the text and illustrations, and
even the texture of the fibers on the pages The decay dilemma
themselves. The focal depth of the cam- If you're preserving a rare book in a digital version, how do you preserve
era, too, gives you a sense of the book's the digital file? Ironically, the digital versions of books don't last long.
thickness and weight. Octavo performs Paper documents, especially those made before the use of pulp (and the in-
minimal image manipulation (some ad- troduction of acid), can remain in good condition for hundreds of years, but
justment of contrast in Photoshop) and, a typical digital file on a CD-ROM might stay fully intact for only 30 years.
Hardware and software can become obsolete even more quickly. Like the
millennium bug, digital storage is taking time to register as a serious prob-
lem, but it could be far more potent: huge amounts of knowledge recorded
in the late 20th century exist only in digital form. Obviously, important digi-
tal files must be transferred every few years to fresh disks. And to protect
against disk failure-from lightning strikes or earthquakes, for example-
backup copies are essential.
But skeptics claim that there won't be time or money to make sure all
that important data gets transferred-there's just too much of it. The best
way, they say,to preserve a digital file? Print it on acid-free paper.The entire
notion of digital preservation begins to sound like an Abbott and Costello
routine. George Farr, director of preservation and access at the National
Endowment for the Humanities, acknowledges the problem and emphasizes
that current digitization projects are really for access, not preservation. He
advocates a hybrid approach, combining digital versions (for easy access),
.figure3 microfilm (for preservation-it's believed to last for hundreds of years),
and the original documents.
When told by an art critic that
anyone could take beautiful photo-
graphs in Arequipa because the
light is so pretty. the Vargas brothers
started photographing the town at
night , using lanterns .flashes, and
early electric lights . But because
such lights could not have illumi-
nated large areas, photographer
Peter Yenne believes that some of
the dramatized night tableaus were
shot in stages; the fixed camera , set
on a 15-minute exposure, probably
captured a series of powder flashes
set off in different parts of the scene-
all of which created what looks like
a single moment.
The Vargas brothers also pro-
duced many portraits of people and
places, including those of(from top
to bottom in center) dancer Helba
Huara, a woman named Clara Luzz i,
sculptor f.L. Villanueva, and the baths
at Yura (near Arequipa) . All of the
images shown here (from Yenne'.s
first visit to Peru) probably date
from the 1920s.

PORTRAITS OF PERU new kind of art, two men in a remote Pe-


This summer, sim ilar round-the-clock ruvian town, 8,200 feet up in the And es,
scanning is occurring in the mountains had also come und er the spell of photog-
of Peru-not with paper, but with glass- raphy. In 1916, Car los and Miguel Vargas,
p late photograph ic negatives from the brothers and self-styled bohemians who
early 20th century. Around the time that modeled themse lves after European art-
Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were ists they read about in Italian magazines,
showing that the camera cou ld create a had begun experimenting with the large

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