“The Onslaught of Our Technology”: The First Microfilm Publication Project (Part 1)

Now, as you say, you encountered a certain skepticism in Howson [chief librarian at Columbia] as to the future of film copy reading. Now is the time for faith. Will you but have faith to listen to what we are planning to do, it will leave Howson absolutely helpless before the onslaught of our technology. We are going to undertake these separate things to introduce into libraries the reading machine of the type that we examined: first, NRA records. It would cost $5000 to get copies of those in the unsatisfactory form in which they are now available. We plan to organize to make film copies of them with a Recordak machine for around $200. Columbia Business School will absolutely have to have them, whether Howson likes it or not. (Binkley to Cecil Pearson, August 1934)¹

I was introduced to David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old this term. His approach to the history of technology – emphasizing use rather than invention – provides a good framework for this little series of posts on a phase in the adoption of microfilm by American libraries and researchers.² By 1934 the main technologies that comprise the microfilm revolution had all been invented, but had not yet settled into the positions they would come to hold. The equipment and practices for photographing pages of books were widely known, but direct reading of microfilm using a projector (rather than printing copies on photographic paper) was still a step too far for most users. These posts will trace in some detail a project which Binkley and the JCMR executive secretary Ted Schellenberg drove to completion in the fall of 1934 and winter of 1935, to produce a corpus of microfilm that would tip the balance in favor of projectors, by being too valuable to ignore and too big to print.

The content of the project was the transcripts of the NRA and AAA hearings which had started the year before. (Let there be no confusion: these two acronyms stand for the “National Recovery Administration” and the “Agricultural Adjustment Administration”.) A few years ago I looked at Harvard’s copy of the original microfilms and scanned a couple of sample sections, and I’ve now shared the scans on Internet Archive (NRA no. 1: Abrasive Grain Industry and no. 143: American News Publishers, and AAA no. 1: Milk).

This post will cover the context (political and technical) in which the project was conceived, and the equipment that was used. The second post will describe the labor of microfilming. The conclusion will look at the effects of the project on the development of microfilm services and on the careers of those involved. In interpreting the sources I’ll draw on my experiences in a digitization team in a library, since many parts of this story are very familiar.

NRA and AAA (May 1933)

We start in Roosevelt’s Hundred Days in the spring of 1933, when many New Deal programs were rapidly created and a spirit of experimentation prevailed in Washington. Two bills that received the presidential signature in May created the NRA and AAA. These agencies appeared likely to mark a turning point in the history of American capitalism by imposing industry-wide codes of practice in competition and labour relations. It therefore seemed vital to enable research libraries to acquire the records of their work for use by future historians.

The premise for the creation of the two new bodies was that the Depression was caused by the gap between the rise of wages and prices in the 1920s, when productivity had increased (due to automation) faster than wages had. The root cause of the gap was taken to be “cut-throat competition” among employers. The solution was to encourage collusion: industry codes would set common high wages, and limit hours so that more workers would be employed. In framing this solution Roosevelt’s think tank looked to models that included Henry Ford’s doubling of wages in 1914 to enable his workers to buy his products, the War Industries Board which had introduced a planned wartime economy during America’s brief involvement in World War One, and the expansion of the role of trade associations in the 1920s.³

Each industry was to submit a code of fair competition, which must contain commitments to collective bargaining, minimum wages, and maximum hours. Once the code had been verified by the NRA there would be a public hearing in Washington, at which anyone could propose amendments. Some hearings were perfunctory, others extended over several days and led to significant amendments. The code would then be approved and come into effect. The AAA played a corresponding role in the agricultural sector. Instead of codes it produced marketing agreements, and it focused on limiting overproduction in order to bring prices and earnings up. The marketing agreements were also the subject of extensive public hearings.

The hearings were described vividly in an article in Current History:

Drop in on one of these sessions. They are handled efficiently, despite a good-natured informality. Outwardly at least, capital and labor and the government appear to work together harmoniously. … A deputy administrator, young, vigorous, cleancut, calls the meeting to order. The proposed code is dissected, clause by clause. … Labor comes forward to state its position on wages and hours of work. … The sweatshop and homework are denounced; a lone employer, to the startled amazement of his colleagues, applauds. Yes, there are liberals among business men. As labor’s demands are unfolded, the industrialists smile skeptically or shake their heads dubiously. … It is the industrialists’ turn. They talk as though their economic lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. “Labor’s demands are preposterous.” … Suddenly the hearing is recessed, maybe to meet later for consideration of a revised code. Tomorrow another group will occupy the hearing room and the process will be repeated.⁴

Submissions and hearings started slowly in the summer and fall of 1933. The hearings were widely reported in newspapers and on the radio.⁵ In late summer, as the pace of progress slowed, a “blanket code” was legislated with the basic provisions for wages and job sharing, which applied to all industries until they established their own codes. The federal government launched a massive advertising compaign using the blue eagle emblem, to build public support for the program. Companies who committed themselves to adhere to the codes would display a blue eagle badge, and consumers would commit to shopping only where they saw the blue eagle. The slogan on the sign was “We do our part”, and this applied to capital, labor and consumers.

The Binkley Family’s Involvement

As the NRA codes were published and the blue eagles appeared, Binkley was keen to see what the public response would be in Cambridge, where he was teaching at Harvard for a year (1932-33). He wrote to his father:

The blue eagles are coming out slowly in this region. I go around brow beating and find a great variety of opinion. In only one case did I find the real kind of enthusiasm that the Administration counts on building up. That was at a gas station. I asked the owner if he was getting any more business and he said indignantly, “I thought it was every one’s duty to chip in.”⁶

Binkley’s father, who had been staying with him in Cambridge and was driving back to California in July, reported on the response to Roosevelt’s programs which he encountered. At first, in western New York, he found hostility; but the further west he went the more support he found. “So I propose, as an educational program for Herbert [Hoover], that he be sent thru the country, East West and N & S on an automobile camping trip. Then perhaps he will be for Roosevelt too.”⁷

Binkley had a family connection with the AAA: his brother Charles, a chemist, had lost his job at the Bureau of Standards when its budget was cut, and found one as an auditor for the AAA:

Tried to get work in NRA & AAA, & eventually on end of August [1933] got work at $30 a week auditing the accounts or contracts of the men who plowed under their cotton. We have paid them now, & they have grown more cotton than last year in spite of the $100,000,000 we sent South. Now, still at $30.00 a week, I’m auditing the contracts of the wheat growers. We had about 1,000,000 cotton contracts and expect nearly as many on wheat. … There is possibility of reversal of the administration’s policy with respect to the Bureau of Standards. If so & when so I’ll feel better, for I do not love this audit work so well. It has one virtue. It is over when the whistle blows, and one gives no thought to the job except only to be in the office on time.⁸

The Microfilm Project

The importance and the volume of the materials that were being collected raised a problem for research libraries, who wanted to support future historical research on the New Deal. The difficulties were described by A.F. Kuhlman, the chair of the ALA’s Public Documents Committee, in a memorandum circulated to librarians in January 1934 (when the code-drafting process had been running for several months).¹¹ Collecting the stenographic transcripts of the hearings as they were distributed to the participants would be very expensive for libraries, because the distribution had been contracted to commercial reporters, who were charging the maximum price of 2¢/page. The ALA therefore urged librarians to write to the NRA and to their representatives in congress to urge the publication of the complete materials by the Government Printing Office; but that too would be a heavy charge on federal funds.

At this time the direction of the JCMR was in Robert C. Binkley’s hands as chair. He was responsible to the committee’s parent councils, which each provided half its funding: the American Council of Learned Societies represented by its Permanent Secretary Waldo G. Leland and based in Washington D.C., and the Social Science Research Council represented by its Executive Director Robert T. Crane and based in New York. The work of the JCMR depended to a great extent on Ted Schellenberg’s energy as Executive Secretary. After his year teaching at Harvard Binkley returned to Cleveland in September 1933, bought their first house, and was active with the Committee on International Intellectual Cooperation led by James Shotwell. JCMR work competed for his attention with his duties as chair of a small history department, teaching a full load. He was under pressure to complete the Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials, which was intended to be a mature replacement for his Methods of Reproducing Research Materials, published in 1931. The Manual still required a lot of work from Binkley and the JCMR secretary Jo McCarter, acting as research assistant.¹² Schellenberg, ever willing to speak unpleasant truths, wrote to Binkley in April 1935: “In my opinion the compilation of the manual on methods of reproducing research materials has entailed an undue sacrifice of good-will…, of time and of money simply because the work was done in fits of sporadic inspiration instead of being made a deliberate effort. We ought to get the thing over with and devote our time to more worthwhile things.”¹³

Schellenberg was 31 (six years younger than Binkley), had recently completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania, was married and had a small child, and had moved to Cleveland when he was appointed Executive Secretary, to work closely with Binkley. He was conscious that the position was not permanent and he would face the academic job market in the middle of a depression. He therefore took care to get credit for his JCMR work while avoiding blame for bad decisions by others. Binkley was very impressed with Schellenberg, and by October 1934 intended to develop him to succeed as chair of the JCMR once the Manual was done.¹⁴ Schellenberg was actively committed to the values and goals of the JCMR, but where Binkley was habitually optimistic, Schellenberg was often caustic in his descriptions of the work he took on and the people with whom he had to collaborate.

In response to Kuhlman’s appeal for the publication of the hearings, Binkley issued the Joint Committee memorandum mentioned above, on the importance of collecting the hearing transcripts and other materials.

Halle Brothers (June 1934)

Binkley’s connection to the topic of the preservation of business records went beyond the purely academic: his friend DeForest Mellon was an executive with the Halle Bros. department store in Cleveland, and published an article in The Bulletin of the National Retail Dry Goods Association on the subject of NRA and business records as historical sources. (The National Retail Dry Goods Association was one of nine trade associations which sponsored the Retail Code, under which Halle Bros. operated when it came into effect.) He wrote that the JCMR approached Halle Bros. (presumably Binkley called Mellon himself) and asked that it participate in the promotion of records preservation (without mentioning microphotography). Mellon connected the program with Binkley’s description of the pivotal transition from pre-code to post-code eras in business history. He also mentioned an argument made by Schellenberg that the records would be valuable not just to historians but to businesses themselves, when they came to study the changes in their own practices. According to Mellon Halle Bros. formed a committee, which determined which records were most significant and arranged for sampling (one day in April pre-code and one in September post-code). Mellon reports that samples of pre- and post-code invoices and relevant correspondence from the period leading up to the signing of the codes would give a clear picture of “the startling industrial revolution”. The article appeared in the June, 1934 issue, as plans for the microfilm project were coming together.¹⁵ It was summarized approvingly in Dale Cox’s weekly column “The Byproduct” in The Plain Dealer in late June, and a couple of weeks later Cox spoke to Schellenberg and reported that he and the JCMR had prompted Halle Bros.’ action.¹⁶

The State of Microfilm in Academia

At this time the JCMR and other groups had a number of new and experimental microfilm projects in progress, though none on the scale of the NRA and AAA hearings:

• In Washington Lt. Rupert Draeger designed an overhead camera for the Navy, which in November 1934 was installed in the library of the Department of Agriculture and became the basis for the new Bibliofilm service, providing microfilms of journal articles in lieu of interlibrary loans. This was the work of Claribel R. Barnett and Watson Davis, and revolved around Science Service and Davis’s circle in Washington.¹⁷
• At Library of Congress the great Rockefeller-funded Project A was coming to a close, having copied nearly two and a half million pages of documents relevant to American history in foreign archives between 1927 and 1934. At first photostats were made on site, but soon film was adopted purely as a means of producing photographic prints in Washington, to be circulated to American researchers by interlibrary loan. As the backlog of unprinted films grew and microfilm readers came on the market, an Argus reader was provided for the use of scholars.¹⁸ Lester K. Born wrote in 1960: “Who knows how much more might have been accomplished if the films had been retained as the end product instead of a medium from which enlargements (not too dissimilar to the familiar photostats) could be made?”¹⁹
• New York Public Library opened a microfilm reading room in May 1934, with Recordak projectors.²⁰ Later in the summer Binkley told Pearson to go there to check the quality of his films.²¹
• The New York Times had been considering a microfilm edition for libraries since 1931 or earlier, to replace the rag-paper edition. By the time the Manual was published at the end of 1935 the Times was selling 35mm microfilm of its 1914-1918 files.²²

Binkley had several personal projects under way, which both supported his own research on the Paris Peace Conference (and the associated research of Shotwell’s students) and also enabled his experimentation with and promotion of the adoption of microfilm:

• Binkley’s project, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, to copy Peace Conference document collections: the House Papers at Yale and John Foster Dulles’ papers in New York, which Binkley reckoned as about 13,000 pages in total, and from which he printed selections photographically page by page. Binkley saw the sharing of these prints as a strategic move to persuade the custodians of large collections to share copies of their unique materials.²³

• He used this and other equipment in family projects, including copying Chinese texts at Harvard for his father’s self-taught translation work on Taoist texts, and for Frances’ work to build a family collection of various types of material.²⁴

• Binkley was in correspondence about microfilm technique with his personal friend Cecil Pearson in New York, whom he hoped to set up as a freelance microfilmer to serve the New York market.²⁵ Pearson was learning photography from the ground up, so his initial results were unsatisfactory, but he was working diligently to improve. With microfilm services available or expected at Library of Congress and Yale, Binkley explained his reasoning to Crane:

  I thought that when [Pearson’s service] gets installed in New York City, I would be able in the next Manual to say that copying at three cents an opening[,] one and one-half cent a page is available at all big libraries in the East except Widener Library, Harvard. That will, undoubtedly, bring Widener into line and the price level will be set at three cents whereas it otherwise would go to five.²⁶

• As an introductory project Binkley used Pearson’s services to support the research of Philip Burnett, a Ph.D. student at Columbia under Shotwell who was in effect supervised by Binkley and who, like Schellenberg, spent time in Cleveland to work with Binkley and with his collection of microfilmed Peace Conference documents.²⁷ Pearson was re-filming the Dulles papers for him to replace Binkley’s copies.

• In the summer of 1934 Binkley assigned Pearson another job: copying a set of Peace Conference papers of Sidney Edward Mezes, found by Ingram Bander in a storage room at City College. Binkley wanted to use these for yet another JCMR experiment for the promotion of microfilm in academia: a publication service which would enable a conventional article to appear in a print journal, with instructions in a footnote to obtain a copy of the source documents on film from the Bibliofilm service.²⁸

The hearings records therefore fit under two of the Joint Committee’s current priorities: the preservation of business records and the promotion of microcopying for scholarly use.

Project Planning (June 1934)

The microfilm project came into focus at the ALA conference in Montreal at the end of June, 1934. Schellenberg was on the agenda of the Public Documents Committee to describe the JCMR’s work on near-print publishing technologies, and Binkley was a late addition to speak about microfilm and argue for a microfilming service at Library of Congress.²⁹ While in Montreal the two met informally with a group of librarians (which must have included Kuhlman and Lydenberg) to discuss the NRA and AAA materials. The librarians supported the proposal of Binkley and Schellenberg for a microfilm edition of the materials.³⁰

The project was then added to the JCMR’s plans for the year, even though the committee’s budget had already been set. The chair and the executive secretary blithely assumed that the labor and production costs could be recouped, without seeking the approval of the parent councils or the other members of the committee. Schellenberg wrote to Crane right after the conference announcing the plan to secure rights to publish the NRA and AAA hearings on microfilm, and mentioning the cost of filming ($160). He emphasized the use of microfilm projectors, saying that Eastman Kodak would develop a projector that could handle 16mm film (for papers like these) and 35mm (for newspapers).³¹ This independent action was typical of the way the JCMR was run at this time. When Dallas Irvine was approached about joining the committee that summer (after cooperating with it through ALCS), he declined, with this explanation: “it seems to me that the wise thing to do is to get the biggest names possible into the committee, knowing that the work will all be done by Binkley and Schellenberg anyway.”³² In October, when the budgetary effects of the project became apparent, the parent councils tightened the reins, calling on the JCMR to keep to the rules about having proponents of projects send them to the parent councils rather than submitting them directly to the committee.³³ (There will be more on this in part three of this series.)

The Project Starts (September 1934)

The work of the microfilm project kicked off when Schellenberg was in Washington D.C. in September 1934; it was quickly decided that he would remain there until the filming was complete, working from an office provided by the ACLS. The project can therefore be tracked in some detail, since it required frequent letters and occasional telegrams between Washington (Schellenberg and Leland), Cleveland (Binkley and McCarter), Chicago (Kuhlman), and New York (the Recordak office and Crane at the SSRC). Many of these letters were bundled with carbon copies of other letters, and occasionally confidential notes were typed on the front copy after the carbons had been removed – all the affordances of typescript correspondence come into play.

For the work of microfilming, Schellenberg collaborated with the Recordak division of Eastman Kodak, which had been selling microfilm cameras to banks for recording checks for the last six years. Recordak provided support and training for the project, free film and processing for the master copy, and the use of a camera. The camera was to be operated by a clerk hired off the relief rolls. This was before the advent of the WPA, but relief programs such as FERA and NYA existed to promote jobs for the unemployed in federal projects, and Binkley was interested in exploring the possibilities of relief labor.

The Equipment

The desk-sized Commercial Recordak used a sheet-feed mechanism which could photograph loose pages at speed. It was described in Binkley’s Manual in 1935, the year after this project:

The machine is about the size of a small typewriter desk. It is foolproof, not only in operation, but also in processing, for the Recordak Corporation combines the sale of its processing service with the sale of film. The loose sheets are fed into a roller, which carries them through the photographic field. They are photographed while in motion, the light reflected from the paper passing through a slit to a moving roll of film. (pp. 171-2)

It is remarkable that Binkley did not know about the Recordak when he wrote Methods of Reproducing Research Materials in 1931, despite the fact that it had been on the market since 1928.³⁶ At that point the Recordak was being marketed to banks and businesses, not to libraries and academics. Binkley’s research for Methods was done over a few months in 1930 and drew largely from the library community, especially the Library of Congress.³⁷ For a few years in the late 1920s and early ’30s, therefore, the American microfilm development landscape was split between the commercial world using sheet-feed Recordak cameras on a full-service basis (the cameras were rented and Recordak processed the films), while the library world experimented with inexpensive SLR cameras (especially Leicas or custom-built cameras at this point) for overhead photography of book openings as single frames (on the model of the photostat), and with processing done in-house or by local photography businesses. It is not clear exactly when the Recordak came to the notice of the JCMR (but I haven’t seen the “Recordak” file under “Film Copying” in the JCMR papers, box 54). The earliest reference I’ve found in the papers is in the spring of 1931, in Binkley’s first contact with Watson Davis at Science Service. Davis had already had Kodak test the use of the Recordak for document photography (with disappointing results).³⁸ Binkley visited the Recordak head office in Rochester, N.Y., in August, 1933, no doubt on one of his trips between Cambridge and Cleveland, and saw the Newspaper Recordak there.³⁹

With the technical arrangements established, all that was needed was permission from the two administrations, access to the records, and a workspace where a Commercial Recordak could be set up and operated. Schellenberg approached the AAA first and quickly gained permission and access. In September 1934 the actual filming could begin.

… to be continued.

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1. Doc. 10020 (1934-08-21): RCB to Cecil Pearson (JCMR Papers, box 55, “(D) Film copying / Services / Cecil Pearson”), p.2. The other “separate thing” mentioned by Binkley is the rumored New York Times microfilm edition, discussed briefly below.↩︎

2. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford University Press, 2007).↩︎

3. Jason E. Taylor, Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act, Markets and Governments in Economic History (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), p.15-25.↩︎

4. E. Francis Brown, “NRA Days in Washington”, Current History 39, no. 3 (Dec. 1933), p.286.↩︎

5. Taylor, p.35.↩︎

6. Doc. 5086 (1933-08-12): RCB to CKB (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1933-40/B)↩︎

7. Doc. 5086 (1933-08-12): RCB to CKB (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1933-40/B); Doc. 6363 (1933-07-26): CKB to RCB (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1931-33/B).↩︎

8. Doc. 5129 (1933-11-11): CHB to RCB (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1933-40/B).↩︎

9. “Historians Preserve ‘Before NRA’ Papers For ‘New Deal’ Era”, Atlanta Journal, 18 April 1934, p.26 (the source of the quotation above). I haven’t found the memorandum itself in the JCMR papers.↩︎

10. Solon J. Buck and Robert C. Binkley, “Report of the Joint Committee of the SSRC and the ACLS on Materials for Research,” American Council of Learned Societies, Bulletin, no. 15 (May 1931): 73–77, at p.74.↩︎

11. Doc. 12860 (1934-01-24): A.F. Kuhlman, ALA memorandum “To Social Scientists and Librarians Interested in the NIRA Hearings” (JCMR Papers, box 4, “NRA and AAA materials / Publicity”). NIRA stood for the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the National Recovery Administration.↩︎

12. In late June 1933 Binkley wrote to Raoul Echeverria at Leitz, to whom he had lent one of the last copies of Methods, “Occasionally I find time to do some work on material for the new edition and hope to have it out in a month or so.” (Doc. 7574 (1933-06-24): RCB to Raoul Echeverria; E. Leitz Co. (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1931-33/E)). However close to done the new draft appeared then, it took two more years to complete, as Binkley struggled to keep up with advances in microfilm and other technologies, and maintain his own interest in the details of the technology. In October 1934 he seemed to be no further ahead. He wrote to Schellenberg: “I have felt right along that the time would soon come when my own thinking would shift from problems of technique in reproduction of materials to the broader cultural problems of increasing the participation of the people at large in the actual labor of research. … And this prospect of the opening of a wider field makes me all the more impatient to dispose of the book on Methods of Reproducing Materials.” (Doc. 10282 (1934-10-17): RCB to T.R. Schellenberg (JCMR Papers, box 36, “General Correspondence / Schellenberg”)) At this point Jo McCarter, the JCMR secretary, had been working on compiling the materials for the new edition, and some chapters had been circulated for comment, but now McCarter was ill and had to take a leave of three months or so. When she returned in March 1935 she prepared a memorandum on the state of the text: of thirteen chapters, three were ready, three needed revision, five were “impossible in their present condition”, and two were unwritten. (Doc. 9620 (1935-03-21): [Jo McCarter], “An Informal Memorandum on the Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials” (JCMR Papers, box 77, “Binkley, Manual”)).↩︎

13. Doc. 10229 (1935-04-16): T.R. Schellenberg to RCB (JCMR Papers, box 36, “General Correspondence / Schellenberg”)↩︎

14. In a letter to Schellenberg about plans for completing the Manual, Binkley wrote:

    For two reasons it would seem to me unwise that you should concentrate upon the Manual: first, because it would necessarily keep you in closer dependence upon me, and, therefore, interfere with your preparations for the complete independence that will come when I retire from the chairmanship and you take over full command… Doc. 10282 (1934-10-17): RCB to T.R. Schellenberg (JCMR Papers, box 36, “General Correspondence / Schellenberg”)

    A week later he wrote in the same vein to Crane, though less definitely:

    we might look forward to a prospect of grooming Schellenberg for the chairmanship, unless we should think a more complete change in the apostolic succession desirable. Doc. 11005 (1934-10-25): RCB to Robert T. Crane (JCMR Papers, box 33, “General Correspondence / Crane”)

    ↩︎

15. DeForest Mellon, “Preserving Business Records for History… An Issue Raised by the NRA,” The Bulletin of the National Retail Dry Goods Association, vol. 16, no. 6 (June 1934), pp. 18-19, 87-88. The Mellons, DeForest and Evelyn, remained friends of the Binkleys and after Robert’s death in 1940 were particularly helpful to Frances in dealing with his estate. Mellon eulogized Binkley in a letter to the Plain Dealer: “He had the gift of initiating ideas and inspiring others to help carry them out and think for themselves. … Short though his life was, the waves impelled by his strength and intellect will ripple far for a long time.” (Plain Dealer, 21 April 1940, p.21-A). In the course of Frances’ move to Boulder in 1941 a couple of boxes of Robert’s papers were accidentally left behind with the Mellons, and not retrieved before Frances’ death in 1962. DeForest donated them to the Case Western University Archives in 1968, ensuring their preservation. “Binkley, Robert Cedric”, ArchivesUSA.↩︎

16. Dale Cox, “The Byproduct,” The Plain Dealer, June 28 and July 11, 1934.↩︎

17. Irene Sekely Farkas-Conn, From Documentation to Information Science: The Beginnings and Early Development of the American Documentation Institute-American Society for Information Science, Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science 67 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p.42.↩︎

19. Lester K. Born, “History of Microform Activity,” Library Trends 8, no. 3 (1960): 348–58, at p.353.↩︎

20. David. C. Weber, “The Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project, 1938-1955,” Harvard Library Bulletin 10, no. 2 (Spring 1956): 275–81, at p.276.↩︎

21. Doc. 10020 (1934-08-21): RCB to Cecil Pearson (JCMR Papers, box 55, “(D) Film copying / Services / Cecil Pearson”): “The ordinary work is and should be the production of films that will read in the reading machine and if you can do that, be happy. Whether you can do that or not, you can always find out by taking any experimental films you make and checking them down at Forty-second Street.”↩︎

22. Manual, p.130.↩︎

23. See my conference presentation “‘If You Could Send over Your Documents to the Photostat Department…’: Paris Peace Conference Documentation and the Advent of Microfilm” (Open Ideas 2021, University of Alberta Library, 2021), pp. 9-10.↩︎

24. “If You Could Send”, pp. 8-9. When his father first planned the trip to Washington and Cambridge, Binkley wrote: “I will have my photographic equipment fitted up to take filmslide pictures of any Chinese texts you want to carry off, or any other texts for that matter.” Doc. 7482 ([1932-09-27]): RCB to CKB (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1931-33/B-Binkley). In the letter about the Blue Eagles, Binkley reported that he had copied several items his father had requested, such as a German translation of the “Kuei Ku Tzu” (Guiguzi), and was in the process of printing them.↩︎

25. Pearson lived on the same floor as the Binkleys when they settled at 49 Morton St. in 1927. At that point he was a chemistry teacher in a private high school, but a few years later he received an inheritance sufficient to enable him to give up teaching and look for a different career. Binkley learned of this and drew him into the document photography business, despite his lack of photographic training.↩︎

26. Doc. 10072 (1933-10-31): RCB to Robert T. Crane (JCMR Papers, box 55, “(D) Film copying / Services / Cecil Pearson”)↩︎

27. See “‘If You Could Send over Your Documents’”, p.10.↩︎

28. Pearson became involved in the summer of 1934 (Doc. 10033 (1934-07-22): Cecil Pearson to RCB, JCMR Papers, box 55, “(D) Film copying / Services / Cecil Pearson”)), and some of his microfilm samples are in are in that folder. In February 1935 Binkley started to arrange to microfilm them with a Recordak instead of Pearson’s camera: Doc. 5068 (1935-02-26): RCB to Ingram Bander (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1933-40/B), which must represent the end of Pearson’s role in Binkley’s plans for the collection). A brief summary was ultimately published in Ingram Bander, “Communication: Sidney Edward Mezes and ‘The Inquiry,’” The Journal of Modern History 11, no. 2 (June, 1939): 199–202. It included a long footnote about the Bibliofilm service added by the editor:

    The review article intended for this issue has been delayed through unexpected circumstances. In lieu of it we are glad to publish this communication concerning vast new possibilities of historical research. It relates to a representative selection of the Mezes papers made by Mr. Ingram Bander. Private access to a typescript copy in 390 pages of these papers will be afforded to scholars properly qualified. …

    The films remained the property of ADI and must not be reproduced.↩︎

29. A.F. Kuhlman, “Public Documents Committee,” Bulletin of the American Library Association 28, no. 9 (September 1934), p.668. Binkley did not appear in the tentative program published in May: “Tentative Program of the Fifty-Sixth Annual Conference,” Bulletin of the American Library Association 28, no. 5 (May 1934): 252–64, at p.261.↩︎

30. Doc. 9555 (1934-11-08): RCB to Robert T. Crane and Doc. 9570 (1934-11-10): T.R. Schellenberg to Robert T. Crane (JCMR Papers, box 74, “Agenda and minutes / Ninth meeting, 23-24 Nov. 1934 (agenda)”). Binkley mentioned the discussion with librarians, and Schellenberg went so far as to state that “The work was undertaken at the behest of a number of librarians, when the matter was brought to their notice” in Montreal. These letters were written when Binkley and Schellenberg were defending their handling of the JCMR budget, so they may have exaggerated the support of the librarians, as will be discussed in a later part of this series.↩︎

31. Doc. 11011 (1934-07-02): T.R. Schellenberg to Robert T. Crane (JCMR Papers, box 33, “General Correspondence / Crane”)↩︎

32. Doc. 9803 (1934-08-28): Dallas D. Irvine to Waldo G. Leland (JCMR Papers, box 83, “Membership”). Irvine was, like Schellenberg, a recent history Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, and worked on photographic reproduction techniques at ACLS in 1933 before moving to the new National Archives the following year. While at ACLS he corresponded frequently with Binkley and Schellenberg, and has his own file in the JCMR papers.↩︎

33. Doc. 9806 (1934-10-04): Waldo G. Leland to Robert T. Crane (JCMR Papers, box 83, “Membership”)↩︎

34. Vernon D. Tate, “The Present Status of Equipment and Supplies for Microphotography,” The Journal of Documentary Reproduction 1, no. 3 (1938), pp. 13-14.↩︎

35. See the next post in this series.↩︎

36. Robert C. Binkley, Methods of Reproducing Research Materials; a Survey Made for the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1931).↩︎

37. Binkley had some form of the text at the Sept. 1930 meeting of the JCMR (his first meeting): Doc. 11184 (1930-11-08): Clara Pfister to Solon J. Buck (JCMR Papers, box 32, “General Correspondence / Buck”), and sent a complete draft of Methods to Buck in November 1931: Doc. 9623 (1931-11-28): RCB to Solon J. Buck (JCMR Papers, box 77, “Binkley, Manual”). In his preface he acknowledges several businesses and business contacts but leads the list with Thomas Martin at Library of Congress, from whom he received information either directly or through Buck, who was then chair of the JCMR.↩︎

38. Doc. 4445 (1931-04-08): Watson Davis to RCB (RCB Papers, Correspondence, 1930-32/S). Binkley and Davis were both looking to microphotography as a solution to the problem of small-edition publishing. Davis wrote: “The results of the experiments which the Recordak Company made in New York, at my suggestion, were such that they felt that the device would need further refinement before it could be applied to the problem we have in mind. That is where the matter rests at the present time, although I am intensely interested in making a practical demonstration.” Binkley sent him a JCMR circular and noted “I am making comparative tests of the Leica and Ansco apparatus” – thereby illustrating the divide between the two approaches even within academic circles.↩︎

39. Doc. 10067 (1933-11-07): RCB to Charles E. Rush (JCMR Papers, box 55, “(D) Film copying / Services / Cecil Pearson”). Binkley left Cambridge on Aug. 13 and was back by the 28th.↩︎