Scientific Information in Wartime

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Scientific Information in Wartime The Allied-German Rivalry, 1939-1945

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By Pamela Spence Richards

ISBN: 0-313-29062-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-29062-6

DOI:

192 pages

Greenwood Press

Publication: 6/30/1994

List Price: $103.95 (UK Sterling Price: £59.95)

Availability:

Media Type: Hardcover

Also Available: Ebook

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Series Title: Contributions in Military Studies

Series Number: 151

Reviews:

Of great interest for upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and specialist collections.
—Choice
A well-researched and well-organized book.
—
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
This slim volume contains a wealth of detail about the information sypply systems used by Germany, the United States, and Great Britain during the period of World War II, to insure that their scientists would get the scientific and technical information they needed, especially in support of the war effort. History such as this is important for the student in library and information science courses and of interest to the general reader as well.
—Libraries and Culture

Description: This book describes how the growing awareness of the strategic importance of science in the 1930s caused the Allied and German leadership to build scientific information supply systems that survived into the postwar era. Using archival materials from five countries, Richards traces the successes and failures of these early scientific intelligence agencies. She focuses on the OSS unit supplying copy for the US government's wartime program to reprint current German scientific journals. She describes as well the methods used by the OSS to spirit individual journal issues from inside the Reich to microfilm squads on Germany's periphery, and gives special attention to the Allied quest for information about the mythical German atomic bomb. Richards also describes the supply system set up by the Nazi government, and how its increasing desperation for Allied scientific news led in the last year of the war to a submarine landing of Abwehr agents on the U.S. coast to microfilm periodicals at the New York Public Library. The final chapter of her book looks at how the wartime experience with scientific information influenced postwar patterns of scientific documentation and librarianship in each country.

Table of Contents:

Preface
The Internationalization of Science and Scientific Information in the Twentieth Century
National Government Support for Scientific Information in Great Britain and the United States before World War II
National Government Support for Scientific Information in Germany before World War II
The Allied Wartime Supply System for Enemy Scientific Information
Germany's Wartime Supply System for Enemy Scientific Information
Postwar Consequences
Appendix A: List of Journals Available in Reprint from the Office of Alien Property Custodian
Appendix B: Title Page, Prefatory Material and First Contents Page of the First Issue of the Referatenblatt, Issued Collaboratively by the Information Centers of the Welt-Wirtschaftlichen Institut in Hamburg and the Technologische Hochscule in Berin, 1942
References
Index

LC Card Number: 93-25050

LCC Class: D810

Dewey Class: 940.54


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