Sitting a few weeks ago at a table in the librarian's office in the front corner of Widener Library, Harvard College Librarian Nancy Cline pulls out a piece of delicate, yellowing paper from a folder containing presentation materials she uses when pitching the library's preservation needs. The sheet was taken from one of the library's thousands of works from the 19th century.

Removing the sheet from its protective slipcover, Cline taps the tops corner of the page. The sheet breaks off and crumbles onto the table.

"That's the lack of temperature and climate control," Cline says. "We're baking those books.... We're not providing [the books] the proper level of stewardship."

A two-month Crimson investigation has found that one of Harvard's most valuable resources and one of the largest academic libraries in the world, the Widener stacks, are "decaying, turning to dust," in the words of Cline. And though the University has made plans to install a climate-control system to curb the decay, none of the $28 million needed to renovate Widener has yet been raised.

Chemically, the decay that Cline so dramatically presents is due to the "acid paper" books were printed on beginning in the 1800s up until the 1950s. But exacerbating the acid paper problem--which causes the books literally to bake--is the lack of climate control in the stacks.

In the longterm, Harvard has made plans to preserve its collections through scanning and micro-fiching decaying books, but doing so to a majority of Widener's 3.2 million volumes will take much longer than the quickly expiring lives of these books will allow.

And this says nothing about the almost 10 million other volumes in the Harvard University Library.

"If you don't have these books in good environmental conditions, nothing else you do to preserve them matters," says Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian Jan Merrill-Oldam, who directs the University's preservation program.

To estimate the extent of the problem, Harvard's Preservation Center has begun sample studies of many of Harvard's libraries to tell what percentage of each collection is in serious jeopardy. Though a complete study of Widener has not been completed, a sample survey of Widener's folios found that 72 percent of the works from 1800-1950 were "imbrittled"--and in grave danger of destruction.

"We need a climate control system urgently. Every year we don't have one, we're allowing serious detriment to this huge collection we have," says Professor of Medieval Latin and Comparative Literature Jan Ziolkoski, who is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on the Library. "It's like having a big old house and not painting it for 20 years."

Raising Library Funds

This weekend, the Development Office and many of the faculty and staff involved with the library will host a library weekend, "Bridging the Centuries: The Role of the Harvard Library Today."

Invited to this event were some of Harvard's wealthiest and best known givers: Steven A. Ballmer '77, Edward M. Lamont Jr. '77 and Sr. '46, Katherine B. Loker and Carl H. Pforzheimer III '58.

These five and more than 200 other invitees all said they could not attend.

Still, 40 people will gather starting today for tea, a tour and dinner and will stay through breakfast, lunch and two presentations on Saturday. Most of them, including Louis I. Kane '53, founder of Au Bon Pain, and John G.L. Cabot '56, have given significant gifts to Harvard in the past.

Despite its overall success in the Campaign, Harvard has had a difficult time fund raising for the libraries.