The Holocaust Documentation & Education Center is pleased to share the following program from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research:
Program: “Information Hunters”
Date: Wednesday, May 5, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM
Platform: This program will take place online.
Please note, registration is required. Please click here to register.
A link will be sent to those who register 24 hours before the program start time and then again 1 hour before the program start time. If you have any questions please contact info@ajhs.org
To view the program in full please click here.
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 traveled 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 gathered 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. 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.
