Back in the 80s when I worked in the photoduplication division of the Library of Congress the first step of “preservation microfilming” for most of the old, brittle books was to Guillotine the bindings. After the QC people had reviewed the film, the original pages were discarded. So “preservation” in this case really was destruction. But it worked better than their attempt at “Mass deacidification,” using DEZ.
Well my father used to work in the MARC development office in the 60s. I will say, that the OLD typeset cards from LoC were more pleasant to read than the monospaced ones from OCLC.
