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.