Information hunters : when librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe

The Resource Information hunters : when librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe
Label
Information hunters : when librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe
Title remainder
when librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe
Statement of responsibility
Kathy Peiss
Title variation
When librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe
Creator
Contributor
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
"Information Hunters examines the unprecedented American effort to acquire foreign publications and information in World War II Europe. An unlikely band of librarians, scholars, soldiers, and spies went to Europe to collect books and documents to aid the Allies' cause. They travelled to neutral cities to find enemy publications for intelligence analysis and followed advancing armies to capture records in a massive program of confiscation. After the war, they seized Nazi works from bookstores and schools and gather together countless looted Jewish books. Improvising library techniques in wartime conditions, they contributed to Allied intelligence, preserved endangered books, engaged in restitution, and participated in the denazification of book collections. Information Hunters explores what collecting meant to the men and women who embarked on these missions, and how the challenges of a total war led to an intense focus on books and documents. It uncovers the worlds of collecting, in spy-ridden Stockholm and Lisbon, in liberated Paris and devastated Berlin, and in German caves and mineshafts. The wartime collecting missions had lasting effects. They intensified the relationship between libraries and academic institutions, on the one hand, and the government and military, on the other. Book and document acquisition became part of the apparatus of national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. These efforts also spurred the development of information science and boosted research libraries' ambitions to be great national repositories for research and the dissemination of knowledge that would support American global leadership, politically and intellectually. military intelligence, librarians, archivists, Library of Congress, Office of Strategic Services."--
Assigning source
Provided by publisher
Cataloging source
YDX
Dewey number
940.54/8673094
Index
no index present
LC call number
D810.C8
LC item number
P45 2020eb
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
  • dictionaries
  • bibliography
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