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"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."--… (more)
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Prior to World War II, information social scientists examined the role that mass media played in shaping public perceptions and its role in a democracy (p. 21). New technologies such as microfilm also spurred the belief that information could be easily distributed and accessed across libraries and educational institutions both nationally and internationally (p. 23). As the war engulfed Europe, “the American Library Association was encouraging a role for libraries in the national defense. Public libraries began to create information centers and offer programs about defense work and international relations; many started book drives for soldiers, refugees, and prisoners of war” (p. 28). Elsewhere, “cultural leaders claimed a special role for the United States as rescuer of the European heritage that underpinned the American practice of democratic and humane ideals” (p. 29). Furthermore, “the war coincided with new approaches in historical studies; historians had long recognized the importance of politics and the state, but now they were also interested in the records of everyday life” (p. 31). These changes influenced the librarians and archivists who joined the OSS, IDC, and other organizations during the war.
Members of the IDC collected any and all printed material they could gather related to Germany, Japan, and the political winds of neutral countries. These included books, newspapers, propaganda, and even gossip. Originals and microfilmed copies were shipped back to the United States or to areas where the IDC could examine it. Peiss writes, “The materiality of publications made them measurable – number of books shipped and microfilm reels shot. Scientific periodicals, technical manuals, and industrial directories directly from Axis and occupied countries were studied closely for evidence of enemy troop strength, new weaponry, and economic production” (p. 59). Processing these collections changed how IDC members viewed information. “To produce information, they needed to extract useful knowledge from the journals and books that contained them and make it identifiable to officials with many different interests” through subject indexing (p. 61).
As Allied forces liberated areas, “documents teams, the most common type of T-force, acquired governmental records, Nazi Party archives, scientific and technical reports, business papers, periodicals, books, maps, and films, exceeding the original mandate of intelligence gathering. Technical experts, economic warfare specialists, army engineers, civil affairs officers, and counterintelligence agents participated on these teams, seeking documents in their own fields. Competition among them was a growing problem” (p. 70). The Monuments Men had little interest in captured books, so much of this material ended up in the collection of the IDC (p. 83). The desire to rapidly collect material that may be of use in winding down the war or future war crimes prosecutions also led to methods in which members of T-forces crossed ethical lines in gathering materials (p. 92).
After the war, the Library of Congress Mission to Europe helped to classify, copy, and acquire materials for research libraries back in the United States while preventing a situation similar to what followed World War I in which various libraries competed with each other to add to their collections materials from war-torn Europe (p. 96). This also aided the army, which “did not have the personnel to sort, assess, and classify [captured German] materials, and the LCM offered expertise for this work of librarianship, which prompted military commanders and intelligence officers to favor the proposal” (p. 99-100). Members of the LCM often encountered difficulties in finding materials produced by the Reich during the war as booksellers did not want to admit to having them or charged more knowing the materials’ rarity (p. 112). Further, regulations limited how the LCM could purchase those items, often leading to an informal or gray economy (p. 105, 107). Some LCM staff took advantage to acquire materials for their own personal collections (p. 119). Alongside and sometimes competing against the LCM, the Hoover Library sent its own agents to Europe to gather materials for the former President’s library (p. 132). Peiss writes, “Despite the logistical challenges, numerous government officials, experts, investigators, and reporters journeyed to postwar Germany, especially Berlin, to gather information, survey conditions, and chronicle ‘year zero,’ the beginning of a new post-Nazi era” (p. 127). During the war, people living in occupied territories collected their own materials for future archives. Peiss argues, “In the midst of fascism’s threat and war’s devastation, these collectors had created archives as an act of defiance and political resistance, of memory making and memory keeping. The documents were often deeply personal, signifying choices made and risks taken; preserving them, despite grave danger, also meant saving themselves” (p. 135).
Back in the US, concerns arose out of rumored plans to pulp Nazi materials. Peiss argues, “The occupation government perceived books and reading to be a danger to the future of Germany, even as it affirmed Americans’ right to read. Its mass acquisitions policy resolved the contradiction by preserving some of these works for research and study while it endeavored to destroy the rest” (p. 147). She continues, “Book burning touched something deep in many Americans. It was a response that went beyond library events and staged protests to a consideration of the larger meaning of the war for humankind” (p. 159). The LCM made it possible to reconcile these concerns, creating copies of works for their historic and legal preservation while removing the originals during the denazification process (p. 162).
Finally, Allied forces were left to deal with collections that the Nazis had stolen from the territories they occupied as well as private owners, many of them Jewish. Peiss writes, “Gathering, conserving, and identifying [these items] posed intractable difficulties on a daily basis, even as military and civilian authorities faced intense domestic and international pressures over the looted Jewish books” (p. 171). She continues, “For the Americans, endangered and orphaned books also generated new understandings of the meaning of book collections, and different ways of thinking about ownership, restitution, and cultural heritage” (p. 171). Peiss concludes, “Although on the margins of the war’s great events, these missions made an imprint on the postwar world of books and information… These activities spurred the international collections of American research libraries, served as an experiment in information science, and offered a prototype for open-source intelligence gathering” (p. 208-209). In this, the members of the various teams and organizations involved “moved information science away from its utopian roots in the documentation movement toward the practical use of library automation in government, industry, and higher education” (p. 209).
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Contents: The country of the mind must also attack -- Librarians and collectors go to war -- The wild scramble for documents -- Acquisitions on a grand scale -- Fugitive records of war -- Book burning, American style -- Not a library, but a large depot of loot.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-259) and index.
Monochrome pictorial dust jacket over red paper-covered boards, silver gilt on spine, black and white endbands.
Boards damaged in two places on front head and one place on back head, with corresponding damage on head of text block. Upper edges of dust jacket bumped, lower right front corner bumped.