Double Fold

by Nicholson Baker

  Philip Morse,1515 an MIT acoustician and founder of Rand Corporation, the Air Force’s non-profit think tank, had spent much of his career evaluating the destructive efficacy of missiles, depth charges, and nuclear weapons, first during the war, as director of the highly successful Anti-submarine Warfare Group, and then later at the Defense Department’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (where Morse argued in favor of the hydrogen bomb) and its successor, the Institute for Defense Analysis; in 1947 he became the first director of the Brookhaven nuclear laboratory and (in his account) the first person to suggest to the Navy that it should start building nuclear submarines; in 1963 he became a board member of the Council on Library Resources. Around that time, as director of MIT’s Operations Research Center, he had the idea of applying OR’s mathematical methods to the workings of MIT’s library; out of that grew Morse’s thickly mathematical treatise, Library Effectiveness (1968), which uses a technique called Markov analysis to determine whether a book of a particular age and number of previous circulations is likely to remain useful; in order to gather detailed circulation statistics, Morse wanted to computerize1616 the library. The modern library, he felt, “cannot now be operated1717 as though it were a passive repository for printed material.”

  One of Warren Weaver’s disciples from the Applied Mathematics Panel was Merrill Flood, a game theorist at Rand who had, during the war, produced a secret OR analysis1818 of the ways that B-29s might bomb Japan. (Bombing with or without propaganda leaflets, incendiaries, or “poison gas”1919 were some of the options listed by Flood.) Flood had risen to become president of the Operations Research Society of America (a group Philip Morse had founded) in the early sixties; Flood believed that OR’s heuristic techniques could help the nation take “very major steps2020 to ‘modernize’ its vast transportation system,” and that sophisticated war games and business games, in which “many of the decisions normally2121 made by humans in real life are made by the computer,” would teach us how to design a better world. Flood’s nuclear-powered wonderland was just around the corner, in fact: “an abundance of nearly free energy, and economical computers for controlling it, are scientific accomplishments already in sight,” he wrote in 1962. About that time, Verner Clapp hired Flood,2222 along with a team of military-intelligence experts, to produce an OR-influenced cost-benefit study, Automation and the Library of Congress. The team was headed up by Gilbert W. King,2323 chief of research at Itek Corporation;2424 Itek was (in those days) a stealthy company run by ex-CIA paramilitarist2525 Frank Lindsay, charged with producing the high-resolution spy-satellite cameras used to microfilm the Russian hinterlands from many miles up. Gilbert King, Merrill Flood, and the others proposed that the Library of Congress’s cataloging and processing functions undergo a comprehensive computerization, using a “trillion bit memory”; the stacks would be closed2626 to researchers, so that monitoring software could track book usage, and so that books themselves might be shelved, unbrowsably, not by call number but by “demand frequency.” (There would be “a complete independence of the physical location of items from their descriptive mapping in the catalogs and files”—in other words, a total reliance on the location records held in the computer.) Microfilm was getting so good, according to the King Report, that soon “the circulation of most documents in their printed form may become unnecessary”; the report suggested that several of the library’s divisions (including the Defense Research Division, funded by the Department of Defense2727 but administered by the Library of Congress, and the Legislative Reference Service, which answered legislators’ questions) might convert their holdings to a computer-coded microfilm-storage system called Filesearch.2828 (Fortunately they didn’t: the U.S. military used the Filesearch2929 system to index thousands of microfilmed North Vietnamese documents as part of its intelligence work; when the hardware was superseded, all the indexing information was lost.) None of this would be cheap: the King Report’s writers unanimously proposed that the Library of Congress devote between fifty and eighty million dollars—three times the library’s total annual budget—to the automation of its basic functions.

  Quincy Mumford, the Librarian of Congress, wasn’t quite so adventurous as Clapp, and he couldn’t put together that kind of money. But the wiry, energetic3030 Clapp wasn’t too discouraged; in 1964 he hired Lawrence F. Buckland3131 to study the practical questions of computerizing the Library of Congress’s catalog-card printing operation. Buckland had been an officer at the Air Force’s Rome Air Development Center in the fifties, where he had helped underwrite Gilbert King’s large-capacity “photoscopic” computer memory (as part of an attempt to create an automatic Russian-to-English translation machine); later Buckland moved to Itek and then, in 1962, he founded Inforonics, a database consulting and publishing company whose early clients were the Air Force, the CIA, and the National Science Foundation. (Buckland’s company produced the first major reference book to be typeset directly from a digital database, the 1969 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary.) A team of systems specialists at United Aircraft also got involved with the Library of Congress’s computer-cataloging project (with the help of steady grants from the Council on Library Resources), and a person named Henriette Avram3232 was engaged to tune and manage the increasingly costly effort—Avram’s résumé included assignments at the National Security Agency, the secretive federal monolith devoted to electronic surveillance and cryptanalysis, and the American Research Bureau, the company that produced the Arbitron television ratings. By the late sixties, after some stops and starts, Clapp and the library he was trying to manage from afar finally had a machine-readable cataloging (MARC) record—ungainly, cabalistically coded, but twenty years ahead of its time. Some of Verner Clapp’s ideas3333 and enthusiasms “have seemed a bit quixotic,” said William S. Dix, then librarian at Princeton, “but in his hands the impossible dream had a way of approaching reality. For he never gave up.” Clapp was a classic bleeding-edge man. Just about every machine dream that administrators now have, Clapp had, and funded, forty years ago.

  Helping large research libraries to disencumber themselves of old books was a top priority: Clapp gave a grant to his erstwhile Library of Congress colleague John H. Ottemiller3434 (a former OSS documents-gatherer who ended up at Yale’s library), which Ottemiller used to pay faculty members to go through the Yale stacks, deciding what to get rid of or move offsite, as part of a “selective book retirement” study; Ottemiller wrote that he saw “a possible need3535 for putting greater emphasis on the discarding of materials rather than their storage.” (Paying the faculty weeders was necessary, Ottemiller said, to overcome “a loss of enthusiasm for the project.”) But discarding was maybe a little ho-hum—how about holographic storage? Clapp hired Arthur Carson,3636 of Carson Laboratories (who had spent much of his career at United Aircraft working on the Air Force’s flightless nuclear-powered airplane), to investigate the recording of texts in rectangular crystals of doped potassium chloride; unfortunately, the stored images faded a little every time the lasers read them. Fiber optics?3737 Clapp asked the Institute for Scientific Information to use “minute but flexible threads of light-conducting material” in a handheld copying device. Clapp was especially drawn to closed-circuit TV; it was attractive, he wrote, because it promised to contribute to the efficiency of library work by “reducing the required number3838 of collections of specialized or little-used material.” If you could combine closed-circuit TV3939 with an automatic, pneumatic page-turning machine, say, you might really have something. Thus in 1958, Clapp’s council contracted with the de Florez Company4040 to develop a pneumatic page-turner, which would allow books to be microfilmed on autopilot, or read remotely by closed-circuit television. (The machine was very handsome: with its air tubes and angled lights, it looked like an expensive piece of dental-office equipment.) The de Florez company was founded by Admiral Luis de Florez, the first chairman of the CIA’s Research Board—an ingenious inventor of oil-drilling equipment and flight-control instrumentation
who also advised the CIA about the potential for radiological weapons4141 (whether to use “light dosage contamination” for example) and the promise of drug-facilitated interrogation. For a time, Clapp and his board of directors thought that there might be commercial possibilities for the de Florez page-turner, but it didn’t live up to expectations. After many tinkerings and infusions of capital, and a trial period in the microphotography lab of the New York Public Library, the machine was set aside; eventually it was pronounced “not particularly suited4242 to the handling of library materials.”

  On the public relations front, the Council gave the go-ahead to Joseph Becker,4343 a senior information specialist at the CIA, to develop a demonstration of (as Clapp wrote in the annual report) “some of the realities4444 behind the talk of ‘push-button libraries’ ” for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. This exhibition, “with an emphasis on the ‘library of the future,’ ” was sponsored by the Council on Library Resources (via a pass-through grant from the American Library Association); other sponsors were the Air Force, Radio Corporation of America, and National Cash Register. In the council’s annual report, a photograph shows Secretary of State Dean Rusk (who incidentally was that same year trying to figure out whether the CIA should use Mafia hit men or poisons to assassinate Castro) looking mildly amused as someone hands him a printout from a Sperry Rand Univac computer. Two years later, a modified version of the library-of-the-future exhibition, this time using IBM computers but again supervised by Joseph Becker, was on display at the New York World’s Fair. As part of a demonstration of networked information, fair-goers were able to pick up a handset from a bank of telephones and listen in on taped reviews of young-adult books.

  Faxing was another of Clapp’s preoccupations—if libraries could fax things easily here and there, then they wouldn’t need to keep as many physical books near to hand. But the hefty Xerox Magnavox Telecopier was too slow: “Transceiving time4545 for an average 10-page request is about one hour.” There were all sorts of other possibilities, though. Clapp thought highly of the now legendary defense-worker J. C. R. (Lick) Licklider—who had spent his twenties studying what happens to white rats4646 if you force them to stay awake for several days by putting them on slowly turning treadmills surrounded by water (they die), and who had developed time-sharing computer systems for the Air Force’s SAGE air-defense system. Clapp hired Lick to look into the elements of man-machine symbiosis as they might shape libraries in the twenty-first century; Licklider got to work in 1961, just before he went on to triumph as the creator of the ARPANET, the Pentagon’s precursor to the Internet—the Internet being itself a leading cause of sleep deprivation. The result, published in 1964, was a coolly abstruse book called Libraries of the Future,4747 written by Licklider and a team of missile-minded members of the artificial intelligentsia, without the aid of a single librarian, historian, or humanist; Verner Clapp proudly wrote the foreword.

  Clapp well knew that some of the projects in which the Council was taking an interest were aimed at “special manifestations of library work4848 such as the handling of in-house industrial research reports or of military intelligence.” But he had no doubt that “libraries generally will eventually benefit.” He was plainly impressed by the work in indexing and retrieval going forward at the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the CIA (in 1953 he had even applied for the job of Air Force Librarian4949): as a lifelong Republican and a patriot who had, while at the Library of Congress, fired or allowed to resign5050 a number of employees when FBI checks found clear evidence of political disloyalty or homosexuality, Clapp wanted to do his part to win the Cold War (which was a war of secret science, demanding speedy but eyes-only informational flow) and to help civilian research libraries at the same time.

  Not all the CIA contacts at the Council came through Clapp, however. Other members of the Council’s board of directors—Barnaby Keeney, Caryl Haskins, and Frederick Wagman, for example—had their own affiliations. Wagman, as we know from Clapp’s papers, worked on unspecified CIA-financed projects with Clapp at the Library of Congress; his career in intelligence began during the war, at the Office of Censorship,5151 an agency responsible for intercepting, reading, and (if they proved interesting) microfilming private letters on their way to and from the United States. Barnaby Keeney, a medievalist and Rhodes scholar, worked for the CIA in the fifties and continued to consult for the agency while he was president of Brown University; he is now perhaps best remembered for his role as board chairman (beginning in 1962, while he was still on Clapp’s Council) of the Human Ecology Fund,5252 a CIA front organization that paid for some of the experiments in which LSD and other drugs were given to unwitting Canadian subjects. (Intrigued by Russian psychiatric research and the possibility of “brainwashing”—a Korean War word—the CIA wanted to improve its interrogational techniques and perfect new methods of what its department heads called “mind-control.”)

  After Barnaby Keeney left the Council’s board—he went on to become the chief of the newly chartered National Endowment for the Humanities—Caryl Haskins5353 (wealthy entomologist, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington) joined Clapp’s team in 1965. Haskins was the founder of Haskins Laboratories and a student of radiation’s effects on living organisms; in 1949 he chaired the Secretary of Defense’s Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, producing a report that contained some startling talk about the possibility of “radiological weapons” and “weapons causing epidemics, glandular or hereditary changes, or other biological ‘chain reactions.’ ” In the fifties Haskins was a consultant for the CIA’s mind-control research: his name appears in a 1952 CIA memo on Project Artichoke,5454 which is described as “a special agency program established for the development and application of special techniques in CIA interrogations and in other CIA covert activities where control of an individual is desired.” (The memo comments on the possible utility of sodium pentathol, barbiturates, hypnosis, neurosurgery, electric shock, heroin, alcohol, Benzedrine, and “lycergic acid” as interrogational aids, and reports that a scientific panel has been established, with Haskins at its head, “to evaluate possibilities and give direction in the field of research and experimentation.”) As a Project Artichoke emissary, Haskins traveled to Canada5555 to discuss the brainwashing experiments with a psychologist at McGill University; and he agreed to remain available to the CIA as a consultant5656 when his attempts to recruit other researchers met with little success.

  Clapp’s library council had traditionalists on its board, too—the gruff and likeable5757 Louis B. Wright was one, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Wright had first felt a need for such a council in the mid-fifties (he just wanted a better way to reproduce pages from rare books and manuscripts); and he had raised Ford Foundation money to fund it and chosen Clapp to run it. A few years into the enterprise, however, he became alarmed by Clapp’s unrelenting gizmology. Wright was overruled; by then Clapp had a physicist on staff and was in full futuristic swing; in 1960, the Ford Foundation board strongly endorsed Clapp, saying that “the most informed point of contact5858 between the computer man, the optics man and the scientific linguist, on the one hand, and the world of bibliographic storage and access, on the other, is the president of the Council on Library Resources.” A number of Clapp’s old Library of Congress co-workers got contracts: CIA consultant Mortimer Taube (an ex-Library of Congress weapons-research abstractor and an Atomic Energy Commission information specialist, described by one of his contemporaries as being possibly “the first library millionaire”)5959 was given the job of developing another hand-reader for microfilm and microfiche, after the Microcard Corporation’s attempts failed. This prototype didn’t work either.6060

  Clapp’s last and most ambitious mechanization scheme—an attempt to create a working electronic library at MIT—was called Project Intrex. In the early sixties, Intrex (administered by Carl Overhage and other veterans of air-defense engineering at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory) had been sponsored by the Indepe
ndence Foundation, a conduit for CIA money6161 in that era; in 1967, the Council on Library Resources assumed lead financial responsibility. Clapp took a personal interest in Intrex, serving on its steering committee even after his retirement from the presidency of the Council; the project envisioned, among other things, “better and more economical systems for weeding,”6262 as well as “digital storage of encoded full-text6363 in massive random-acccess storage.” (“Massive” and “mass” were thermonuclear words that seemed to get the hearts of information scientists beating faster.) But Intrex’s historian, Colin Burke, sums up the project thus:

  Project INTREX fell very short6464 of the expectations of all its sponsors. After some eight years INTREX ended with little more than a few pieces of soon outdated hardware, some homeless software, and twenty thousand indexed articles in a limited field called “material science.”

  Intrex’s only visible achievement, Burke adds, was a set of paper finding aids called “Pathfinders,” which helped students get around the reference collection.