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Who Wants Yesterday's Papers? was a symposium organized by librarians and graduate students at the University of Maryland in 2002 to bring the debate about the future of print collections to campus. The symposium included academic faculty to strengthen communication with them about these issues. Besides reporting what the faculty said they wanted at the symposium, Carignan describes some of the trends changing research libraries in ways not anticipated in 2002, and some of the responses needed for continued stewardship of and access to print collections in research libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the controversy related to the book "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper," by Nicholson Baker. The book subsequently received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this book Nicholson gives a history of the decisions made by the institutional elite of the library science profession beginning in the late 1940s until 1980s or even until 1999 to destroy large numbers of newspaper collections, and books, with the goal of saving them by micro-filming. The book received three types of reponses, first those of scholars, secondly those of librarians in elite institutions and thirdly, the responses of journalists. One can speculate that librarians who had either helped make the decisions described in the book, or had carried them out, or defended them, felt themselves under personal attack by Baker's thesis. The final importance of Baker's book lies not in whether he completely, and with unfailing objectivity, presents the activities of the past, or presents a list of changes that may already have been underway at the time of publication.

The article discusses use of cellulose acetate lamination for document conservation. Topics discussed include book "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper" by Nicholson Baker on it, creation of a roller-type machine to heat and press the laminate film or foil to the document by William J. Barrow and addition of plasticizers to the cellulose acetate film to give it strength.

This article focuses on the book "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper," by Nicholson Baker. Books are the elite, gracing living rooms and commanding high prices at auctions. Librarians like to look after books, which can be stored so easily — and on such small shelves. In libraries, while newspapers are consigned to annexes on the outskirts of cities and delivered to readers by hefty men in overalls, books are kept in centrally located libraries, read in elegant reading rooms furnished with leather-clad chairs and supervised by Oxford-educated librarians speaking in hushed voices. In short, newspapers suffer from a kind of typographical "class prejudice". In the eyes of some librarians these ephemeral daily sheets of paper simply can't live up to the status of those superior forms of literary life, books. In terms of conservation policy the differences in attitude are startling. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when newspaper volumes were being torn apart in preparation for microfilming all over the U.S. and then disposed of, it seems no librarians batted an eyelid. Imagine for a moment that the same fate had been proposed for 19th century novels — the howls of anguish from the normally hushed librarians would have been deafening.