Nicholson Baker - Double Fold - Libraries and the Assault on Paper

2. “full cropping”: On books that had “inordinately wide margins and no more than nominal value,” Rider had his staff “trim a wide slice off all three edges of the book, covers and all….Our theory in treating them thus roughly is that it is expensive enough to store the texts of such materials: and that we have no very good reason to store forever a lot of accompanying waste paper” ( Compact Book Storage [New York: Hadham Press, 1949], p. 60). Henry Petroski discusses (without, perhaps, the requisite incredulity) Rider’s related attempts to store Wesleyan’s books with their fore-edges down and their titles and call numbers hand-lettered on their cleanly guillotined bottom edges; Petroski says that “overall [Rider’s] analyses were sound and truly space-saving, even if a bit extreme and labor intensive.” Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). On the jacket of Compact Book Storage, Rider prints blurbs from prominent librarians: Luther Evans at the Library of Congress was, predictably, “very much impressed” by the book’s recommendations: “I entertain the serious possibility that we may adopt some of them.” Harvard’s Keyes Metcalf wrote, “We have been doing thinking along the same lines”; Yale’s James T. Babb said the book was “tremendously interesting.”

3. Wildlife Disease: See “Scientific Journal in Microfilm — An Experiment in Publishing,” Library Journal, April 1, 1959.

4. “The Problem of Size”: Council on Library Resources, Third Annual Report (1959), pp. 11ff. In 1961, Clapp wrote: “One of the most obvious advantages to be obtained by libraries from microcopying is in saving of storage space, but the cost of microcopying is so great as rarely to justify its use for space-saving alone. Additional justification is required, such as saving of binding costs, preservation against deterioration, ease of duplication, or adaptation to mechanized duplicating or information storage-and-retrieval devices.” Council on Library Resources, Fifth Annual Report (1961), p. 23.

5. “baloney, baloney”: Kathleen Molz, “Interview of Verner Clapp, Council on Library Resources, Inc. by Kathleen Molz, editor, Wilson Library Bulletin, ” p. 17, Verner Clapp papers, Library of Congress. Later published as Kathleen Molz, “Interview with Verner Clapp,” Wilson Library Bulletin 40:2 (1965). In this version, Clapp refers to the gap between scientists and humanists as “a bunch of sheer baloney.”

6. “After numerous inquiries”: Verner Clapp, “The Library: The Great Potential in Our Society?” Keynote address at the second annual Congress for Librarians, St. John’s University, Jamaica, N.Y., February 22, 1960, Wilson Library Bulletin, December 1960.

7. “The world’s population”: Council on Library Resources, Third Annual Report (1959).

8. “Massive dissemination”: Verner Clapp, The Future of the Research Library (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), p. 30.

9. “the storage library would”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 25.

10. “lesser-used books”: Clapp, Future of the Research Library, p. 25.

11. “loved gadgets”: Deanna B. Marcum, “Reclaiming the Research Library: The Founding of the Council on Library Resources,” Libraries and Culture 31:1 (winter 1996).

12. “solutions to the problems”: Council on Library Resources, First Annual Report (1957).

13. Warren Weaver: Weaver was a guiding spirit at the Rand Corporation; at an early Rand gathering in June 1948, doing his best to recruit the finest war talent available, he said that Rand would occupy itself with problems of “military worth,” investigating “to what extent it is possible to have useful quantitative indices for a gadget, a tactic or a strategy, so that one can compare it with available alternatives and guide decisions by analysis.” Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 72. See also Erik Peter Rau, “Combat Scientists: The Emergence of Operations Research in the United States during World War II,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999; Rau mentions, for example, Weaver’s hope of recruiting architects, civil engineers, and construction engineers to aid the mathematical study of “aerial bombardment,” p. 330.

14. “fire control”: See Warren Weaver, Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), pp. 77ff.

15. Philip Morse: Morse’s autobiography is In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977). In 1946, Morse and another “polemologist” (warfare scientist; their coinage, from the Greek polemos, warfare) published a classified textbook covering damage coefficients, lethal areas, train bombardment, and gunnery statistics, but even then Morse was already thinking about using the same quantitative techniques to assist in urban planning. Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research (Washington, D.C.: Operations Evaluation Group, U.S. Navy, 1946).

16. Morse wanted to computerize: Morse mentions a decision to move some books to the basement of the science library: “If circulation had been computerized at the time, the move could have been planned with greater knowledge of expected results, and also a wider variety of possible actions would have been available to choose from.” Philip M. Morse, Library Effectiveness: A Systems Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), p. 166.

17. “cannot now be operated”: Morse, Library Effectiveness, p. 1. “Books are still the most convenient packages of information, but this may no longer be true in the future,” Morse writes (p. 186).

18. secret OR analysis: “The broad purpose of Project AC-92 is the determination of optimum tactics for use in the employment of very heavy bombers in operations against Japan.” Merrill M. Flood, Aerial Bombing Tactics: General Considerations ( A World War II Study ) (Santa Monica: Rand, 1952).

19. “poison gas”: Flood, Aerial Bombing Tactics, p. 6. Flood was also one of the inventors of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game-theoretic thought-experiment in which two criminals decide independently whether each will inform on the other. See William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

20. “very major steps”: Merrill M. Flood, “New Operations Research Potentials,” Operations Research 10:4 (July — August 1962): 436.

21. “many of the decisions normally”: Flood, “New Operations Research Potentials,” p. 429.

22. Verner Clapp hired Flood: I say “Clapp hired” because Clapp made all the decisions: “the choice of projects to be funded were,” in the early years of the Council on Library Resources, “very much Clapp’s.” William Joseph Crowe, “Verner W. Clapp as Opinion Leader and Change Agent in the Preservation of Library Materials,” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1986, p. 70.

23. Gilbert W. King: Gilbert W. King et al., Automation and the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1963). King was a follower of Warren Weaver and Philip Morse; “Operations research is meaningless unless it gets results quickly,” he wrote in a paper on probabilistic techniques. Gilbert King, “The Monte Carlo Method as a Natural Mode of Expression in Operations Research,” Journal of the Operations Research Society of America 1:2 (February 1953). King worked on projects for the Office of Naval Research, and he developed a translation machine at International Telemeter and IBM before moving to Itek. The others who worked on the King Report, as it came to be known, were: Harold P. Edmundson (of Planning Research Corporation, a Rand spin-off with large military and CIA contracts), Merrill M. Flood (formerly of Rand and later of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, a center that sponsored research in psychopharmacology and computer networks under the direction of wartime OSS psychologist James Grier Miller), Manfred Kochen (also of Rand and then of the Mental Health Research Institute; Kochen did the math behind the idea of “six degrees of separation”), Richard L. Libby (Air Force intelligence), Don R. Swanson (who worked at defense-and-intelligence contractor Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, soon to become TRW, and who eventually took charge of the library school at the University of Chicago); and Alexander Wylly, who had studied tank logistics for Planning Research Corporation in 1956.