Roslyn Russell, an historian and habitual researcher, reviews an important heritage initiative N-Plan—the National Plan for Australia’s newspapers—was a decade old in 2002. Instigated by the Council of Australian Libraries in the early 1990s, N-Plan was established in response to rising concerns about the status and preservation of Australia’s newspapers, particularly their degree of brittleness. There was also awareness that small local newspapers were not being collected. This was seen as a policy deficiency in the libraries charged with collecting items of heritage significance for communities across the nation. Nothing gives a more intimate view of a community’s life than its newspapers. Events great and small find a place in their pages, from the results of a local show to world cataclysms, triumphs, celebrations and tragedies. Small victories as well as large are reported, from the winners of local football competitions to international sporting events. And the cycles of life are always present: births, marriages, and deaths. Often the smaller the community—and the newspaper—the more extensive the coverage of significant events. Newspapers that connect individuals of the same ethnic or religious heritage form a vital channel of communication for nourishing communal roots. Giving a community access to its newspapers is central to the N-Plan philosophy. Newspapers, however, can be as fragile as accurate memories of events. The wood-pulp paper on which they are printed is high in acid and degrades easily and quickly, becoming yellow-brown and brittle within days of exposure to sunlight, and ultimately crumbling to dust. They are, after all, not intended to be permanent: the usual fate of newspapers is to be discarded at the end of the day. An old joke about bad—or good—newspaper publicity once was that ultimately it didn’t matter; the newspaper on which it was printed would soon be wrapping up fish and chips. Nowadays, it isn’t even used for that purpose, except in trendy retro restaurants. It is not simply the ravages of time and chemical reaction that threaten our newspaper heritage. A member of the National Library’s Preservation staff went to Albury to give preservation advice about copies of the Border Mail held in a warehouse. The newspaper had been microfilmed and copies were held in the State Library of New South Wales and the State Library of Victoria. Not long after her visit, the warehouse burned down. Had the newspapers stored there been the only copies, and no microfilm copy existed, a priceless record of the lives of the communities along the Murray River would have been lost. The fierce bushfires that devastate our country in summer can claim more than human victims and real estate.
Many researchers have had a nasty shock when the corner of a page of an old newspaper, crisp as a pappadum, broke off as the page was turned, or a small tear appeared along the side. The experience brings home the impermanency of the newspaper heritage held in bound volumes, and the need to restrict access to them for the sake of their survival. At its inception in 1992 the N-Plan program—coordinated by the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL), at the time known as the State Libraries Council—focused on several major goals. Every Australian newspaper should at least be recorded; hard copies of newspapers should be collected and held by responsible institutions, if possible in their state of origin; and for the purpose of preserving them, newspapers should be microfilmed, and a consistent standard applied to this process. The advantages of microfilm over access to original newspapers are obvious. Copies can be viewed by more readers simultaneously; and fragile pages can be protected from the inevitable damage that can result from handling them. Microfilm is also a far more efficient way of conveying material to readers than transporting huge bound volumes from library stack to reader desk. A senior library officer at one of Australia’s state libraries became convinced of the need to microfilm more of the library’s newspaper collection after helping to relocate it. After two hours of pushing trolleys full of broadsheets, she was heard to say something like ‘I do and I understand’.1 N-Plan is one of a number of international initiatives to preserve newspaper material on microfilm. The United Kingdom’s Newsplan 2000, supported by the Heritage Lottery and the newspaper industry, concentrates on microfilming newspapers after receiving advice on which titles to film from institutions in seven regional groups in England and single groups in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.2 The United States Newspaper Program supports projects in each of the 50 states of the Union, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Projects are organised within each state, with one agency taking the lead as project manager, and each project conducted by a single institution, mostly that state’s largest newspaper repository.3
Despite the advantages conveyed by microfilming newspapers and making them accessible to a wide readership, there has, in the last few years, been significant criticism of microfilm—and libraries’ and archives’ reliance on it—by United States novelist and non-fiction author, Nicholson Baker. An addict of the look and feel of old newspapers, Baker was devastated to discover that major libraries in the USA and Britain were disposing of them after microfilming—to other libraries, to collectors, and even to entrepreneurs who sold original newspaper issues as birthday presents. In his eyes, the old newspapers he bought from these libraries in an attempt to rescue them were still in good condition, and likely to remain so for an indefinite period. He saw no reason to claim, as librarians had done, that the papers were slowly degrading because of their high acid content—the ‘Slow Fires’ that were the subject of an information film made by the USA library sector about the necessity driving its preservation processes. Baker claimed that United States libraries that had transferred their newspaper holdings to microfilm and discarded the originals had ‘bet the farm on film’4. In some cases, he claimed, the microfilming was of poor quality, and so the only record of that publication to survive did so in an inferior and hard-to-access condition. Baker claims that ‘there is nothing intrinsically wrong with micro-filming’5 but the practice of shearing off bindings to reduce gutter shadow was a slippery slope that led to the ‘idea of destroying to preserve’.6 Baker’s book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), detailing what he regarded as the ‘crimes’ of some of America’s and Britain’s great libraries in disposing of original newspapers and relying on microfilmed copies to provide ongoing access, provoked a spirited reaction from the library and academic communities. A response from the Association of Research Libraries in Washington rebutted Baker’s claim that newspapers properly stored will last indefinitely, claiming that ‘Research, however, does not support that view’. It listed the positive effects of microfilming in terms of increased access: ‘In many instances, filming has made it possible to access unique material that distant libraries would not loan’. In response to Baker’s claim that bound volumes had their spines guillotined off to make their contents easier to film, the reply was that ‘better cameras and improvements in the design of book cradles resulted in more detailed images and eliminated the need for disbanding most volumes. Most libraries now preserve the paper copies, if they are not embrittled beyond hope.’ Australia’s N-Plan would not be subject to Baker’s criticism—with one exception. Despite his assertion that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with microfilming, he does seem to believe that microfilm is a bad thing in itself, describing the experience of browsing through microfilmed newspapers as ‘a brain-poaching, gorge-lifting trial’.8 N-Plan retains and stores the original newspapers from which the microfilm has been taken. It then makes microfilm copies available to libraries and, ultimately, to many more readers than could access bound volumes of newspapers stored at a single location.
N-Plan has racked up an impressive list of statistics relating to the newspapers that have been included in its program. As each state reports its results in different ways, there are several ways in which the amount microfilmed through N-Plan is described. The State Library of Victoria has microfilmed 15 000 volumes of newspaper. In New South Wales, the State Library has microfilmed 1845 newspaper titles, with a total of 20 024 095 pages. The State Library of Queensland has filmed 227 titles, and the Archives Office of Tasmania has filmed 31. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the National Library all report the number of reels of microfilm produced: the State Library of Western Australia has produced 1735 reels, the State Library of South Australia 1959 reels, the National Library 2348 reels, and the State Library of Tasmania 602 (comprising 121 titles). Care of microfilms is also an important part of N-Plan’s responsibility for our newspaper heritage. Several projects are underway to safeguard fragile master copies. At the State Library of New South Wales, microfilm masters are being located and an inventory created, duplicate negatives are being made for existing microfilm masters, and cellulose acetate masters are being replaced by a more stable medium. At the State Library of South Australia, cellulose acetate masters are copied and sent to the National Library of Australia’s cold store. While much has been achieved over N-Plan’s 10-year lifespan, more remains to be done. Although major newspapers are filmed by commercial microfilming bureaux, freeing libraries from the need to do this themselves, bureaux that have the capacity to conduct preservation quality microfilming are scarce and in high demand, so backlogs quickly accumulate. The backlog of unfilmed newspapers will also require the expenditure of large amounts of money. Preserving Australia’s newspaper heritage is still a daunting task for N-Plan, even after 10 years of work. ROSLYN RUSSELL is an historian and museum consultant and a partner in Marsden Russell Historians. |
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