Baker v. Librarian

Nicholas Baker tells an exciting story about the failures of microfilm and American libraries in general. He uses his years of experience as a fiction writer to craft a doomsday tale so believable that you must keep yourself from running to the microforms office of your local library to protest the destruction of our collective historical record between chapters. Baker sprinkles his tale with histories of paper made from mummy wrapping, exploding vacuum chambers, and connections to CIA torture experiments.

My question to the class is, what of Baker’s story do we believe and why have we done so? Here is a man who has no formal library training, traipsing through some of our country’s greatest information depositories telling us, librarians, how to do our jobs. Moreover, he spends thirty-eight chapters telling the public that we have lied to them about the state of our collections and that our books are not in fact falling apart on our shelves as we have stated for years in our requests for funding. What has driven him to tear apart decades of procedures perfected by library professionals and are his concerns about these practices valid?