Warren Haas, who assumed the presidency of the Council on Library Resources in the seventies, described Clapp to me as “bubbling” and “full of beans.” Deanna Marcum, the current president of the (renamed and substantially repurposed) Council on Library and Information Resources, has written that Clapp “loved gadgets,1111 and was forever thinking about what could be invented to make library jobs more efficient or streamlined.” Clapp was looking for “solutions to the problems1212 of libraries”; and in his search he had help from his board of directors — a group that included some extremely bright war scientists and CIA consultants.
Warren Weaver1313 was one of the Council’s founding board members. He had been chief of the Applied Mathematics Panel during World War II, performing the ballistics computations necessary to create machines that shot down planes with the help of radar (work known as “fire control”1414); this war effort led Weaver to the nascent field of Operations Research (OR), which endeavored to calculate, with the help of glittering curlicues of equations superimposed on a gaunt gray skeleton of simplifying assumptions, the least costly way to transport troops, position anti-aircraft guns, or bomb cities. Weaver was also interested in the statistical mathematics of human communication and the possibility of machine translation — and from there it was only a hop and a skip to the Council on Library Resources. (It didn’t hurt, either, that Weaver was a vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, which had paid for much of the early work of newspaper microfilming at Harvard and the Library of Congress.)
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.