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 Independence 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 short
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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.
Why couldn’t Clapp have shown a little patience, and funded more quiet inquiries into techniques of cataloging Persian works (as some traditionalist members of his board6565 would have much preferred him to do), reconciling himself to the fact that whatever glorious man-machine couplings were in the offing, they weren’t going to happen in his lifetime? Why couldn’t he have left library administrators alone, rather than forever distracting them from their primary task as paper-keepers by dangling the lure of convulsive change before them, long before the change was practical, and long before it had revealed its many risks? Clapp especially goaded his alma mater, the Library of Congress, to invest in seductive prematurities, early systems that broke down, cost a fortune, spread confusion, didn’t focus, made life more difficult, and failed in general to do what they were built or bought to do. Forty years and many generations of scrapped prototypes later, libraries are still trying to get Clapp’s remote-access full-text wish-list to fly.
But brute shrinkage was the idea closest to Clapp’s heart, and there (despite the disappointments of machines like the Verac) the basic technology was already mature. Microtext, he wrote, has “rescued many millions of pages6666 of newspapers from oblivion at comparatively low cost and with a concomitant saving of space”—the next step, then, was to perform a similar sort of “rescue” on journals and then books. The question was how to pay for it. In College and Research Libraries, Alan Pritsker and William Sadler had, in 1957, dealt an inadvertent blow to the burgeoning micro-movement in a cost study that found microfilming to be of financial appeal as an alternative form of storage only if libraries (and their patrons) were willing to tolerate (1) somewhat fuzzy print, (2) minimal quality control, and (3) “the destruction of the text.”6767 (The researchers assumed textual destruction because the microfilming system that they were using in their estimates of work-flow, the RemRand Model 12, required that pages be “fed automatically into the machine.” That in itself was not a problem, the authors wrote: “Since the purpose of microfilming is to reduce the space requirements, the cutting of the bindings is considered inconsequential. Any possible gain from the resale value of these books would be more than offset by the increased efficiency in filming.”) And yet, despite their diligent efforts, Pritsker and Sadler found microfilm conversion to be a costlier means of storage for research libraries than bookshelves. (Alan Pritsker, incidentally, went on to become a pioneer of digital simulation, creating the computer languages JASP for the Air Force and GERT for NASA.)