Well, first, NYU is a private not "state owned" university. That is it is a 501 (e) non-profit like Harvard and the University of Arizona and hundreds of others.
These universities include important actual state owned ones like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Indiana, have amazing decades long excellent procedures for storing and now, digitizing the contents of various aspects of the workers movement and beyond. Even NYU, which has many of the papers of the CPUSA as the article noted but as part of The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, make all the stored materials, as John brought this up, off site but available upon request everything that has been catalogued. The problem with Original Paper (OP) is that is disappearing. The high acid paper of the 20s-50s era of left socialist and labor papers is slowly turning into confeti. It is disappearing and won't be available for anyone unless it is on microfilm (MF) or has been digitized. Most libraries now have various programs for digitizing their collections. Most of us at the Marxists Internet Archive have been advocating the digitization of works by labor and other organizations for 3 decades now. We met huge resistance as most academic libraries where so many papers have been donated to originally took a small shopkeepers attitude and resisted totally any digitization at all. No less than the chief archivist of the CPUSA who was able to get the CP to sell their archives to the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and then got himself a job working full time for those archives in cataloging it. He argued against any participating by libraries of any sort on the Internet at all at the various American Library Associations. He viewed the internet as a threat to libraries generally. Fortunately he was not only wrong, but eventually ignored. I worked as a professional archivist of OP at the Holt Labor Library for almost a decade as its director. We preserved OP as best we could but we provided much of the stock for PDFs for the MIA in terms of both American socialism and communism as well as the Trotskyist movement. Some of the OP was consumed as part of this process but as it is not digitized, it will about forever. Originally much of the stock (a similar experience John had it seems) came from academic libraries. In Holt's case from Stanford. How does this happen? It has little to do directly with funding per se but rather the process of preservation using MF. First let me say MF sucks. If the original camera work for MF was at all out of focus and uncorrected, then one ends up with barely readable text in the image. MF itself deteriorates and will eventually see the images disappear. For the last 60 years, large institutions have MFs their collections of left material and then tossed the OP into the dumpsters out back. Sad, but true. We have thousands of MF-to-digital copies of various papers and journals on the MIA but they are only as good as the MF. We always preferred OP and continue to seek it out over MF. There are issues with PDFs as well. Most of our original PDFs were done without embedded text. This means copying and pasting is difficult unless the user wants to OCR the PDFs themselves (and many do). Often, even when scanning and digitizing OP, the software settings are incorrect with lower default resolution and incorrect paper size (tabloids, for example, scanned as if they were 8 1/2 x 11 letter size) which can screw up what one sees on the computer screen. The crime of course here is the tossing of OP into the shredders by major institutions, something I can't ever forgive them for. David -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42190): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42190 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119978120/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
