Binkley was born in
Lititz, Pennsylvania, of
Mennonite ancestry, but his family moved to California when he was still an infant. He attended
Stanford University in 1915, and interrupted his studies in 1917 to serve in the
USAAS in
World War I. After the Armistice he studied for a term at the
University of Lyon, and was then hired in July 1919 by Prof.
E.D. Adams to gather
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 this library while he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under
Ralph Haswell Lutz 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. Many of these items were printed on inferior paper and had already begun to deteriorate only a few years after their creation. Binkley therefore became interested in the problem of preserving perishable
paper. After completing his Ph.D. in 1927 Binkley was hired as a lecturer in history at
New York University at Washington Square. During his two years there he campaigned for funding for a research program to develop chemical processes to preserve paper, and also to investigate the new possibilities of microphotography. He spent the summer of 1929 in
Rome, where he presented a paper and some resolutions on the perishable paper problem at the first
IFLA congress. On his return he took up a position at
Smith College replacing
Sidney Bradshaw Fay, who had moved to
Harvard. A year later he was called to chair the history department at the Women's College at
Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, filling
Henry E. Bourne's place. Binkley was elected vice-president of the
American Documentation Institute at its foundation in April, 1937. His priority for the ADI was to push the limits of copyright by developing a test case for a library copying service. This led to conflict with Davis, and Binkley ultimately resigned in January 1939, frustrated that the ADI had not taken action towards a test case, but still supportive of the institute. Binkley died in Cleveland of esophageal cancer on April 11, 1940, at the age of 42. He married Frances Williams at Stanford in 1924, and left two sons, Robert W. Binkley and the early music scholar
Thomas Binkley. Binkley was posthumously awarded the fifth Pioneer Medal of the National Micrographics Association.
Peace Conference History He emerged in the front rank of historians of the Paris Peace Conference in the early 1930s with his articles making use of the first collections of official documents to be published. His interest in publishing collections of documents grew out of his work at Stanford and found its outlet on the editorial board of
James T. Shotwell's series
The Paris Peace Conference: History and Documents for the
Carnegie Endowment.
Joint Committee and Documentary Reproduction The combination of expertise in publication and preservation of documents led to his appointment to the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, as secretary in 1930 and then as chair from 1932 until his death. The purpose of the Joint Committee (which came to be known as the "Binkley committee") was to propose and promote solutions to problems in scholarly communication, including access to primary sources and publication of research results. Under Binkley's leadership the Joint Committee supported ever more innovative uses of new technologies for documentary reproduction, especially
microfilm, with which he had been experimenting in his own darkroom with a
Leica camera. What
Watson Davis was to the promotion of microfilm in the sciences, Binkley was to the social sciences and humanities. He compiled two widely used manuals for the use of the new technologies, in 1931 and 1936. He hired
T. R. Schellenberg as executive secretary of the Joint Committee and worked with him on the first large-scale microfilm publication project: the records of the hearings of the
Agricultural Adjustment Administration and
National Recovery Administration in 1934, comprising 315,000 typescript pages. Binkley and Davis led a symposium on microfilm at the
American Library Association conference in
Richmond in 1935, which marked the emergence of microfilm into the mainstream of scholarship in the social sciences. The success of meetings such as this led to the establishment of the
Journal of Documentary Reproduction, on whose editorial board Binkley served. He proposed putting microfilm at the center of the American entry at the
1937 Paris Exhibition, hoping to show Europe an American information technology "as striking on the intellectual level as the
Taylor system of
scientific management or the
Ford assembly line work in industrial technology".
Copyright The reproduction of documents by and for libraries using new technologies naturally involved questions of
copyright. The Joint Committee negotiated a "gentlemen's agreement" with the publishers covering what constituted fair use. Although it had no legal standing, the agreement guided library practice for the next 40 years and influenced the
Copyright Act of 1976. The agreement (which was actually negotiated by
Harry M. Lydenberg for the Joint Committee) fell short of Binkley's hope for coverage of teaching and research uses of materials: he said that it "protects what libraries have done in the past, but not what they might do in the future."
WPA The establishment of
New Deal relief programs in the 1930s, especially the white-collar program of the WPA, enabled him to apply his ideas on amateur scholarship. He wanted to find ways for university graduates who were not employed in academia to continue to participate in scholarship in their field. The relief programs wanted to employ large numbers of white-collar workers. Binkley seized the opportunity to promote programs to make documentary collections such as archives and newspaper collections accessible to scholars and to amateurs. The Annals of Cleveland project employed 400 workers to write and publish abstracts of newspaper articles from 1818 to 1935 in 44 multigraphed volumes. It was widely copied by WPA projects in other cities. A project to create finding aids for archival collections in Cleveland was the pilot for the
Historical Records Survey, for which Binkley did the initial planning and served as a consultant. == Influence ==