How American Librarians Helped Defeat the Nazis
Recruited to the war effort thanks to their deft research skills and technological know-how, librarians used microforms to gather and share intelligence with Allied forces.
By: Katie McBride Moench, Accessed on November 29, 2023, JSTOR Daily
https://daily.jstor.org/how-american-librarians-helped-defeat-the-nazis/
In war, as in everything, information is power. And for the United States and its allies in World War II, an epic battle from an analog age, that meant obtaining and transmitting by hand useful intel—like the development of destructive new weapons—before the Nazis could prevent their enemies from getting it.
Enter the librarians, tapped by US government officials to help in this effort. These librarians adopted technology from other fields to photograph an array of documents, including those that were rare and/or archival, and found means of sending them across continents. They used both microfilm and microphotography—technologies that came to play a key role in the wars of the twentieth century.
