TY  - BOOK
AU  - Peiss,Kathy Lee
TI  - Information hunters: when librarians, soldiers, and spies banded together in World War II Europe 
SN  - 9780190944612
AV  - D810 .C8 P457 2020
PY  - 2020///]
CY  - New York, NY
PB  - Oxford University Press
KW  - United States
KW  - Office of Strategic Services
KW  - Library of Congress Mission to Germany
KW  - World War, 1939-1945
KW  - Confiscations and contributions
KW  - Europe
KW  - Military intelligence
KW  - Books
KW  - History
KW  - 20th century
KW  - Intelligence service
KW  - Information services
KW  - Acquisitions (Libraries)
KW  - Cultural property
KW  - Protection
KW  - Librarians
KW  - Destruction and pillage
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; 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
N2  - "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."--
ER  -