Robert C. Binkley

Robert C. Binkley (1897–1940) was an American historian and microfilm advocate.

Life

Robert Cedric Binkley was born December 10, 1897 in in Lititz, PA, but grew up in California. He studied at Stanford University 1915-1917, then served in the US Army Ambulance Corps during World War II. He was commissioned to collect ephemera published by delegations to the Paris Peace Conference and by wartime societies in Paris and London for the newly formed Hoover War Collection at Stanford. He served as reference librarian in its library while he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the response of European public opinion to Woodrow Wilson, using the materials he had helped to acquire in Europe as well as the Hoover's extensive collection of wartime newspapers. The rapid physical deterioration of these materials made him interested in paper preservation.

In 1930 Binkley was elected to the newly formed Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Sciecne Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, became Secretary, then Chairman from 1932 until his death. He prepared a manual for the committee, Methods of reproducing research materials, (1931) and a revised version in 1936.

Binkley chaired the history department at the Women's College at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He died on April 11, 1940 in Cleveland.

Contributions

• Binkley was influential in drawing attention to the need of paper preservation and promoting technical aids for scholarship, notably microfilm.
• Binkley helped found the American Documentation Institute and was vice-president on its foundation in April, 1937.
• He was appointed to the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. He served as secretary in 1930 and then as chair from 1932 until his death in 1940.

Publications

Binkley published on a very wide range of topics. A list is in Zotero [1]. See also his Selected papers (1948) for a list of 178 published writings by him (pp 399-416) and 25 about him (pp 417-419).

• Selected papers, ed. with a biographical sketch and a bibliography by Max H. Fisch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948.
• Methods of reproducing research materials; a survey for the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards, 1931. (See Gitelman 2014, 53-82).
• Manual on 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, MI: Edwards, 1936.
• "The reproduction of materials for research." In: Library Trends; papers presented before the Library institute at the University of Chicago, August 3-15, 1936. Ed. by Louis R. Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago. Graduate Library School, 1937, pp 225-236. On archives, libraries and the economics of photocopying and near-print reproduction.

Further reading

• See the biographical "Introduction" (pp 1-43) and "Chronology" (pp 45-46) in: Selected papers, ed. by Max H. Fisch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948.
• "Robert C. Binkley." Wikipedia [2]
• Farkas-Conn, Irene. From documentation to information science: The beginnings and early development of the American Documentation Institute—American Society for Information Science. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. [3]
• Meckler, Alan M. Micropublishing : a history of scholarly micropublishing in America, 1938-1980. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

For his Methods of Reproducing Research Materials (1931):

• Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Towards a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, chap 2, pp 53-82).